Perfmon Counters

Today's tip comes from Senthilnathan over at Testing-Virtuoso. Senthilnathan provides a very succinct set of tips for network performance testing. From that post, some tips for performance counters in Perfmon:

Network Interface\Bytes Received/Sec
Network Interface\Bytes Sent/sec
Network Interface\Bytes Total/sec
Network Interface\Current Bandwidth
Network Interface\Output Queue Length

If the Network Interface\Bytes Total/sec is more than 50 percent of the total network utilization, then your server is having some problems under peak load conditions.

Correlate the network counter values with Physical Disk\% Disk Time and Processor\% Processor Time utilization. If the Disk\% disk time and %processor time values are low and the network queues are high then there might be a problem with your network card/ bandwidth.


I love seeing what counters performance testers look at. If you have some different counters you use when testing, feel free to share.