Hi All,

I've been using PAL for many years since version 1.2 and it has proved time and time again as probably the most valuable tool I have along with Powershell. Presently I'm on 2.3.2 on a dedicated HP DL380G5 with Win7Pro64, 2 x Xeon X5260 and 32 GB RAM and lots of Hdd space to keep all my tsv and report files. It also runs IIS to provision reports for Devs and Engineers.

The issue:

Most of my perfmon (tsv) log files average around 300mb with counters from System Overview, SQL and BizTalk. I run all reports with 4 threads, but they take a looonnnggg time to get processed.

Illogical logic…

This might seem a bit awkward but when I ran the same kind of reports on the same machine with 1 cpu and 2 threads it would freeze up to the point I would actually have to power it off and on to run the report again but with 1 thread. Thru Logic, 2 cpu’s would take 3 threads and with 4 it would probably freeze up, but fortunately it doesn’t. I know the Process part of the analysis takes a really long long time, because of those processes that come and go, but is there a way to put some nitro into the overall analysis.

Thread Experiment…

I ran an experiment consisting of a generating a report based on the SystemOverview template counters and processing all counters in 10min slices. The perfmon tsv file is 10mb, has 3988 counter instances gathered with 5s sampling over 318 samples (26min). For optimum performance I also excluded PowerShell from the antivirus real-time scanner. No other tweaks or changes were made.

1 thread took 00:25:51.4200000

2 threads took 00:38:54.3996000

3 threads took 00:35:29.8524000

4 threads took 00:34:06.7994723

5 threads took 00:33:27:3986307

6 threads took 00:27:26.1940614

7 threads took 00:27:23.3915625

8 threads took 00:25:09.1240301

9 threads took 00:25:13.1816888

10 threads took 00:27:31.921.2992

Are your processing times similar ??? Worse or better ???

How can we “overclock” PAL??? I know it will probably depend on a combination of factors, but would really like to know your views on this.

Hi icefyre,

In my own use of PAL, it is extremely CPU intensive, so each thread will consume a full processor. For example, I have 4 real processor cores on my laptop. When I run PAL with 4 threads, my computer becomes unusable unless I set the processing priority to Low. The low priority setting in PAL doesn't work when multiple threads are used unfortunately - something I still need to implement.

Email me directly at clinth@microsoft.com and we can talk about this more. This sounds like a fun conversation. :-)