Dacris Benchmarks: Test PC Performance

In Dacris Benchmarks, system monitoring means observing resource usage (like CPU and memory) in real time as well as keeping track of resource usage for later analysis (also known as logging).

Why is this useful? Sometimes you want to spot that exact moment when your computer went sluggish, and figure out why it did. With the Dacris Benchmarks system monitor, you can spot the exact process that is using all of your CPU or determine if you need more RAM because you ended up using all of your RAM at some point, causing your system to become sluggish.

To start the system monitoring console from Dacris Benchmarks, go to Tools - Monitoring in the main menu.

Note: System Monitor is a separate application and requires elevated privileges in Windows Vista or later versions of Windows.

Once System Monitor is started, you'll see a window like the one below:

The most interesting feature here is logging. Click Start Logging to begin logging system resource usage. Logging is now enabled, and logs will be automatically created. Click Stop Logging to end the logging process and disable logging.

Under All Logs, you will see a list of all logs generated while logging was enabled. A log contains several snapshots of the system's state at a particular point in time. Each snapshot has a list of processes running at the time, plus overall CPU and RAM usage.

Highlights is where all the action is. Dacris Benchmarks will automatically generate highlights from your logs, to show you only logs that might be worthy of attention. You don't want to manually browse through all the logs to find a snapshot with high CPU usage. The Highlights section shows you snapshots sorted by descending CPU usage or by descending RAM usage, and it only shows you snapshots that are above a certain threshold in terms of CPU usage or RAM usage.

Important: Be sure to click the refresh button () after a period of logging, to view the latest logs that were generated. The list of logs is not automatically refreshed.