Advanced Process Monitor for Windows
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 27th May 2008 10:36 UTC, submitted by Pierre
Windows Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell have released a new version of a real-time process monitor for Windows (tentatively called 'Process Monitor') that combines the features of Regmon and Filemon. There is a whole set of new features too, of course.
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No point
by FunkyELF on Tue 27th May 2008 14:59 UTC
FunkyELF
Member since:
2006-07-26

In my opinion there is no point in having a good process monitor for an operating system that doesn't manage processes properly, which is the one thing OS's should do correctly.

Great, a process is hogging the CPU, I want to kill it. How do you start up your process monitor. In Windows every time that happens I hit ctrl-shift-esc to bring up the task manager and it doesn't show up until the process is done hogging the CPU. That, or it takes 2 minutes for it to come up, then you kill the process 20 times over the next 2 minutes before it actually stops. I'm pretty sure these are fundamental problems in Windows itself and using a different process monitor won't help. I've used process explorer and its nice to find which process has a file handle preventing you from deleting or renaming a directory but its no better at killing processes.

With Linux if anything other than X freezes or is hogging your CPU you can still fire up a terminal and run xkill without waiting much time at all. If X freezes you can ctrl-alt-f1 and kill the process manually and most times you don't even need to restart X.

So, what I'm saying is that there are fundamental process handling problems with Windows XP that didn't get fixed in Vista....but ooohh is it shiny!

Reply Score: 1

RE: No point
by b0ne on Tue 27th May 2008 15:21 in reply to "No point"
b0ne Member since:
2006-05-19

Both Process Explorer and Task Manager run at the "real time" process priority (ie: it gets scheduled before almost everything else), so it usually takes a few milliseconds to come up even in a heavy load environment, not several minutes.

As for terminating the process, you can use command like tools from sysinternals (see: pskill) or tasklist and taskkill which are built in to XP and newer.

Reply Parent Score: 3

RE[2]: No point
by Moocha on Tue 27th May 2008 16:56 in reply to "RE: No point"
Moocha Member since:
2005-07-06

Both Process Explorer and Task Manager run at the "real time" process priority (ie: it gets scheduled before almost everything else)

No, they do not run using the Realtime priority class. By default they both run at High priority.
so it usually takes a few milliseconds to come up even in a heavy load environment, not several minutes.

CPU load, yes. I/O load, no. If a runaway process eats up all your disk bandwidth, it can take minutes for the OS to read in the text pages from an executable, be it even the smallish taskmgr.exe.

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE: No point
by Bit_Rapist on Tue 27th May 2008 18:38 in reply to "No point"
Bit_Rapist Member since:
2005-11-13

n my opinion there is no point in having a good process monitor for an operating system that doesn't manage processes properly, which is the one thing OS's should do correctly.

Process monitor is not a program you start when you have a hung process. Its a tool you use when you need to investigate what a process may be doing in realtime [not exactly realtime but a trail of what the process has done].

If you have a hung process, its a little late to start process monitor. You might start process monitor and then try to recreate the issue to investigate a possible root cause, but starting process monitor in response to a hanging process will generally yield few results.

Edited 2008-05-27 18:40 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 4

RE: No point
by stabbyjones on Wed 28th May 2008 02:50 in reply to "No point"
stabbyjones Member since:
2008-04-15

if you try and close things from the applications tab in windows task manager it can take multiple tries. this is because it's trying to close the program not kill it.

closing from the processes tab is a one time kill.

applications is the junkie with a flick knife and processes is the sniper. i don't know many people who use the task manager for any more than restarting explorer so this may be a bit of overkill.

Reply Parent Score: 1