Physical Memory Usage Alarm

This alarm becomes active when a process is suffering a potential memory leak.

A memory leak occurs when a program continues requesting memory over a period without releasing any memory.

For some programs (such as Spotlight) this behaviour is expected as the program stores information over an extended period for dynamic near-history analysis.

Process CPU Utilization Alarm

Process CPU Utilization Alarm

This alarm becomes active when a process is sustaining a high CPU load.

When this alarm is active, you may need to:

• Investigate what the application is doing: a high CPU load may be an expected activity.
• Terminate the application if it is not responding. Some applications do not terminate through Windows Task Manager; if this does not work, use the KILL.EXE command from the Windows 2000 resource kit, or the TASKKILL.EXE command on Windows XP or Windows 2003 systems.
• Consider upgrading the system's processor.

Processor Queue Length Alarm

This alarm becomes active when the length of the processor thread queue reaches a threshold for sustained activity.

A long sustained queue length indicates a processor bottleneck - leading to overall system degradation.

To rectify this, you should look at:

• The Processes page of the Processes drilldown to see which Windows process is consuming the CPU.
• Possibly moving some processing activities to another system.
• Add an additional CPU to the system – the waiting threads will be load balanced between all available processors.
• Upgrade to a faster CPU. This will allow the CPU to process threads faster, but may not reap the same rewards as adding an additional CPU.

Related Topics

Processes Page

Read Hit Alarm

This alarm is activated when the proportion of file read requests that can be sourced from memory cache rather than disk drops below a threshold.

When this alarm is current you should:

• Look at the NBT page of the Network drilldown.

  If there is a large number of read requests coming from the network clients, the cache can be inundated and temporarily of little use.

• Look at increasing the physical memory of the system.

Related Topics

NBT Page