As a Windows user, knowing how to maintain the operating
system’s problems is a big advantage. When your system crashes, unexpected
shutdowns or an application stops responding, what would be your steps to find
the source of the problem? Fortunately Microsoft provided some great tools for
keeping track of your system performance and health in the Windows 7 and 8. I
have written some articles about these tools before such as "How to use WindowsEvent viewer", "Windows Performance Monitor" and "Performance Monitor SystemHealth Report". Today I intend to introduce another tool in the Windows 7 or 8
that you can use to find information about your system resources (hardware and
software) in real time. This system tool is called "Windows Resource Monitor".
By using the Windows Resource Monitor, you are able to monitor specific service
or process, troubleshoot a hung program, and even start, stop and resume a
service. Let see how to work with Resource Monitor:
First of all to open the Windows Resource Monitor go to
Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Resource Monitor.
Or type "resmon" in the Run dialog box and hit the Enter
key. To make Resource Monitor available in the Windows 8’s Start screen, from
the Charm bar (Win + C) go to the Settings>Tiles>Show Administrative
Tools.
When the Resource Monitor opened, you’ll see a window like
the figure below. Resource Monitor contains 5 tabs: Overview, CPU, Memory, Disk
and Network. On the Overview tab you can check the basic system resource usage
information and the other four tabs as their name suggested, display the
information about CPU, Memory, Disk and Network usage information.
Tables and Chart Panes
Each tab on the Resource Monitor window contains multiple
tables showing the detailed information about the featured resource. For
example the Overview tab includes CPU, Disk, Network and Memory tables. To
expand and collapse any table, just click on the arrow icon on the right side
of the title. Each table contains some columns (like Description and Status).
To hide and add any column to a specific table, right-click on the column title
and choose Hide column or Select column then add a new column from the list. To
know more about each column, simply hover the mouse on the column’s label to
see more information.
Microsoft also has provided Chart Panes for each tab on the
right side of the window. These charts display graphical information about the
current tab’s resources. To change the size of the graphs, click on the View
button and then select your desired size. You can also hide the Chart Pane by
clicking on the arrow icon at the top.
If you have more than one processor, to see graphs about
specific processor, when the CPU tab is opened, from the menu select Monitor
and then Select Processors.
Now that you are familiar with the layout of the
Resource Monitor window, let see how we can use this tool to identify Resource
Consumers.
Before I start I should tell you how to start/stop and
filter the data. To pause the monitoring of current data, from the menu go to
Monitor>Stop Monitoring. To resume the Monitoring again you can select Start
Monitoring with the same menu.
For filtering the detailed data in a table,
select one or more processes or services in the key table (the top most tables in
each tab). To undo the filtering, clear the check box or boxes. To clear all
check boxes together, clear the check box next to the image. When you filter
the result, tables other than the key table will only show information about
the selected service. Filtered results can be recognized by an orange bar
below the title bar of any table. For example currently in my system the
Firefox and Photoshop are opened and I want the see the detailed information
about these two applications. I have selected them for the filtering results.
Check the figure below:
Find the process with the maximum CPU usage
Go the CPU tab and on the Processes table, click on the CPU
column label. The first process in the list is the process/service with highest
current CPU usage.
Find addresses of connected processes to the network
Go to the Network tab and select the process that you want
to identify its network connection. Expand the TCP Connections table and then
check the Remote Address and Remote Port columns to see the addresses and ports
that the process/s connected to.
Find the available space on storage devices
Go to the Disk tab and expand the Storage table. Here you
can check the Total Space and Available Space (in MB) of your system physical
disk.
Find the available memory space for the programs
Go to the Memory tab and view the available memory (in MB)
for the programs in the Physical Memory table. This amount is the total of
standby and free memory together (include zero page memory).
Control processes and services
To end a process in the key table (the top most tables) of
any tab, in the Image column (the first column from the right), you have to
right-click on the name of the process and then select End Process.
To suspend a process, again in any key table, right-click on
the process name and then select Suspend Process.
To resume a suspended process, in any key table, right-click
on the process name and then select Resume Process.
To start, stop and restart a service, go to the CPU tab,
expand the Services table and then right-click on the Name of the service/s.
From the menu, select Stop Service, Start Service or Restart Service.
How to analyze a process and troubleshoot unresponsive
programs
The hung or unresponsive programs will appear as red sings
or entry in the Overview tab and in the CPU table. Also you can find them in
the Processes table of the CPU tab. The cause of an unresponsive application
can be due to unavailability of system resources. It means the application must
wait till other process to be finished before they can continue. Windows Resource
Monitor allows you to Analyze Wait Chain of a process. After the processes that
prevent your desired program to respond, you can terminate them by ending the
processes.
Go to the key table on any tab and then right-click on the
process name. From the menu select Analyze Wait Chain. If the process is not
waiting for any other process to finish and working normally, then nothing will
be displayed. Otherwise a wait chain tree will be displayed that of the tree
you can choose one or more processes by selecting the check boxes next to each
process and then End process.
View Handles and Modules
Before I started with how to use the Resource Monitor to see
which handles and modules are associated with a process, you should know what a
handle is and what is a module?
A handle is a pointer (memory location) for referring to a
particular system resource like files, registry keys or directories. In the
Windows operating system, an application cannot directly access system
resources and it must use a handle that has ability to change the system
resources. A handle has an entry that contains the locations (addresses) of the
system resources.
A module is a helper file or program (block of codes or
instructions) that includes dynamic link library (DLL) files. A DLL is a
combination of programs that needed for executing an EXE file.
To find all handles and modules used by a running process or
program, go to the CPU tab and select the process that you want to see its
associated handles and modules. Expand the Associated Handles and Associated
Modules tables and review the results.
To see a specific handle currently is using by which
processes or programs, in the title bar of the Associated Handles table, select
the search box and enter the name of the handle. Then click the search button.
I hope this article was helpful for you to use the Windows
Resource Monitor as a tool for troubleshooting the applications’ problems, see how processes and services use the system resources and know more about the Windows operating system architecture.
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