Monitor Your System Performance With Samurize

Have you ever wondered what is going on under the hood of your Windows system? Why is it so sluggish and slow (read: sloooooooooow)? Why is my harddisk continuously blinking? Or that CPU fan sounding like a jet engine? - As a software developer with a passion for code quality and performance I always strive to produce solid code and software algorithms, but you will not know how it actually behaves until you measure. Even though software the development environments of today come with an army of sophisticated tools to help you squeeze out the numbers during a test run they do not give you a general feel of how your system normally performs. Windows comes with perfmon, but configuration and interpretation of those graphs is a pain at best. Samurize to the rescue!!!

Samurize to the rescue!
Using Samurize and a little imagination you can build a very slick system status display that will make your friends turn green with envy! The configuration I use looks like this:
Once you have settled in on a base set of performance counters and how you would like them displayed, CPU-, Memory- and Disk-Usage histograms are a good place to start, it is easy to expand your configuration to include more items you want to monitor like SQL Server, Network traffic, etc. After creating and selecting your configuration you will want to set the display position to "docked" so the meters are always visible.

Here is a link to download the configuration I currently use.


I will explain how to interpret the different sections of this configuration in future posts.

Update: Replaced configuration file contents with a download link.