How do I figure out whether my process is CPU bound, I/O bound, Memory bound or

Question

I\'m trying to speed up the time taken to compile my application and one thing I\'m investigating is to check what resources, if any, I can add to the build machine to speed thi

Answer 1

Random-pausing will tell you what is your percentage split between CPU and I/O time.

Basically, if you grab 10 random stackshots, and if 80% (for example) of the time is in I/O, then on 8+/-1.3 samples the stack will reach into the system routine that reads or writes a buffer. If you want higher precision, take more samples.

Answer 2

Start > Run > perfmon.exe

Performance Monitor can graph many system metrics that you can use to deduce where the bottlenecks are including cpu load, io operations, pagefile hits and so on.

Additionally, the Platform SDK now includes a tool called XPerf that can provide information more relevant to developers.