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JONATHANHELD

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A Task Manager that records task activity, OR triggers a snapshot if a process goes above 90%?

Hello!  I asked this a few months ago, on EE, but in a different area, and I got no responses. Perhaps you programmers would know.

I am looking for an XP "Task Manager" with a specific feature.  A task manager which will do any of these things:

-when a process uses CPU % above a predetermined threshold, a "snapshot" is taken of all processes running (and their %) at that moment, and recorded.  Or,

-all process activity is recorded, in a loop, so I can call up the "process state", say 47 minutes ago. Or, even better:

-it will record a log of every running process, each second, 24/7, and the CPU% each proc is using. Yes, a large log file, but I would only need to run it for a day or two.

Does this utility exist? It would be great for troubleshooting a common problem: when a computer freezes for 20 seconds, randomly, a few times a day. This would point to what process may be the culprit. Or if an enduser says "my computer was extra slow last night around 8:00", I could just look at the log to see what process was hogging the CPU.  (could be a virus scan, but also could be a virus or malware or an unneeded background task)

I know how to use built-in "Performance Monitor" to do something similar, but it will NOT log processes which start after PerfMon was started.

They're gotta be a utility like this!  If not, it would probably be a very popular shareware app, if written.

Thanks!
-Jon
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wnross

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wnross

One comment to make, often these "20 sec hangs" are extremely intractible: in fact, they can lock the kernel sufficiently that monitoring utilities may
miss samples.  On one system, I recorded a CPU utilization of ~5% despite the fact that the system was entirely unusable (turns out it was a
bad network card).

I Recommend running Sysinternals Process Explorer to get a handle on your system, Mark Russinovitch has an article on some of the steps he used
to get to the bottom of a similar delay

Process Explorer
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html

Case of Periodic Hangs
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/07/case-of-periodic-system-hangs.html

Cheers,
-Bill
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from the author: I just closed the the question and issued the points.

Thanks Bill!
Thank you Johnathan, glad to help