microsoft windows process monitor download from microsoft

If the traffic slows for long enough, the scale will change to 100kbps, or even 10kbps, so that even at lower traffic rates, the spikes of traffic can be viewed. In the example above, the scale is 10mbps, or 10 megabits per second, and the graph peaks at around the 4mbps range. Network Activity GraphĪt the top of the right-hand column, you’ll see this graph, which shows the average network traffic total for the last 60 seconds.īe forewarned that the scale will change automatically based on traffic. Here you’ll find several panes of information about the network activity happening on your machine. (Yes, all these similar sounding names can be quite confusing.)Īs I said, I’m going to focus on using Resource Monitor to monitor network activity. Resource Monitor is probably somewhere between Task Manager and our old friend Process Explorer in complexity, with just a hint of Process Monitor thrown in. Resource Monitor is really just a process monitor with a different interface. In fact, if instead of running “perfmon”, you run “perfmon /res” (without the quotes), you come directly to this interface. In the descriptive text in the upper pane, you’ll see a link that says “Open Resource Monitor”. It’s a fairly intimidating application, unless you’re well-versed in Windows technical details, so it’s decidedly not what I’m recommending here. If you run “perfmon” (Windows Key + “R”, enter “perfmon”, click OK) you’ll end up with something similar to this. Perfmon, the system performance monitor, has been around for a long time. It actually can monitor several areas of your computer’s activity, but I’ll focus here on networking. It’s a utility that quickly displays a lot of information about what’s going on. Of late, I’ve found myself firing up a completely different utility included in Windows 7 and 8 to monitor network activity.

The problem is that it’s a pretty geeky tool, and requires a little patience and understanding to get useful results.

My normal response for this type of problem is to turn to Process Monitor, a free SysInternals utility from Microsoft.

Microsoft windows process monitor download from microsoft