Physical Disk

If the physical disk is used too much on a machine hosting Intelligence Server, it can indicate a bottleneck in the system's performance. To monitor physical disk usage in Windows, use the Windows Performance Monitor counters for the object Physical Disk and the counter % Disk Time. If the counter is greater than 80 percent on average, it may indicate that the machine does not have enough memory. This is because when the machine's physical RAM is full, the operating system starts swapping memory in and out of the page file on disk. This is not as efficient as using RAM. Therefore, Intelligence Server's performance may suffer.

By monitoring the disk utilization, you can see if the machine is consistently swapping at a high level. Defragmenting the physical disk may help lessen the amount of swapping. If that does not sufficiently lessen the utilization, consider increasing the amount of physical RAM in the machine. For information on how Intelligence Server uses memory, see Memory.

MicroStrategy recommends that you establish a benchmark or baseline of a machine's normal disk utilization, perhaps even before Intelligence Server is installed. This way you can determine whether Intelligence Server is responsible for excessive swapping because of limited RAM.

Another performance counter that you can use to gauge the disk's utilization is the Current disk queue length, which indicates how many requests are waiting at a time. MicroStrategy recommends using the % Disk Time and Current Disk Queue Length counters to monitor the disk utilization.