Question

I’ve been researching a bit about .NET Performance counters, but couldn’t find anything detailed (unlike the rest of the framework).

My question is: Which are the most relevant performance counters to get the maximum computing power of the machine? Well, the .NET virtual machine, that is..

Thank you,

Chuck Mysak

Answer 1

You haven’t described what you mean by “computing power”. Here are some of the things you can get through performance counters that might be relevant:

1. Number of SQL queries executed.
2. Number of IIS requests completed.
3. Number of distributed transactions committed.
4. Bytes of I/O performed (disk, network, etc.).

There are also relative numbers, such as percentages of processor and memory in use which can give an indication of how much of the “power” of your system is actually being used.

However, you will not find anything that correlates cleanly with raw computing “power”. In fact, who is to say that the machine’s full “power” is being taken advantage of at the time you look at the counters? It sounds like what you really want to do is run a benchmark, which includes the exact work to be performed and the collection of measurements to be taken. You can search the Internet for various benchmark applications. Some of these run directly in .NET while the most popular are native applications which you could shell out to execute.