Multiple Processes- Same Name

When testing on Microsoft Windows where you need to monitor the performance of many processes that have the same name,  there is a major obstacle.

If you have nine sessions each with a process ‘P’ running in it, the process names are allocated in numerical order by perfmon using the format <name>#n.  When e.g. the first one logs off,  the processes that were started subsequently occupy their preceding name.

Thus the process name P#1 is successively occupied by actual process Pid1 through 9. 

In order to get figures for all the processes,  you would need to :

·         Monitor counter for ID process for each agent process

·         In the results,  look for when each process ends – that is where the leftward shift begins.

·         Then recompile the numbers for all the counters monitored for that process. 

Microsoft provide a registry change which allocates the process ID to each counter that is monitored. 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2010/03/30/perfmon-identifying-processes-by-pid-instead-of-instance.aspx

Of course in any serious performance test you need to configure monitoring in advance.  The process id varies all the time so it can’t be configured in advance in Perfmon or any test tool.

All in all it means a lot of hard manual work to get the numbers together when there are many clients logged on during the test. 

None of the performance tools in the market address this problem,  though it can and has been dealt with by inhouse solutions at Appsense.