Question

What does "Disk Highest Active Time" mean in the Windows Server 2008 Reliability and Performance Monitor

Asked by: sevzas

I see "Disk Highest Active Time" in the Windows Server 2008 Reliability and Performance Monitor.  It displays a percentage.  Sometimes jumps to 100%.  What does it mean and how do you interpret it?

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Asked On
2009-09-22 at 09:13:20ID24752031
Tags

Windows Server 2008

,

Reliability and Performance Monitor

,

Highest Active Time

Topics

Microsoft Server

,

Windows Server 2008

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
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Answers

 

by: ambot13Posted on 2009-09-22 at 09:22:57ID: 25394549

According to this site (http://www.mahalo.com/answers/windows-os/what-does-highest-active-time-in-my-microsoft-vista-resource-monitor-mean-why-can-it-be-pegged-at-100-with-very-little-disk-activity), "The highest active time is the percentage of time spent performing IO (actually processing time spent at the IO level)."

I would interpret that to mean that it is the percentage of total disk time spent performing IO.  Hitting 100% wouldn't be bad, but pegging might be.

 

by: sevzasPosted on 2009-09-24 at 13:31:30ID: 25417552

I initially found that link using google, but I needed another explanation.

So I take it that if I had 100% highest active time, that means that the disk is pretty much spending all of its time reading and writing which means that apps are potentially waiting for io to complete.

 

by: ambot13Posted on 2009-09-24 at 13:49:20ID: 25417727

Yes, if you do experience a condition like that, or if you just want to check it out further, set up a perfmon to look at disk I/O and disk queue length, then correlate that to the Disk Highest Active Time.

 

by: sevzasPosted on 2009-09-24 at 13:51:10ID: 31632014

didn't provide much more than what I found using a google search

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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