I stumbled across a new blog today that has a bit of Kaseya related content, blog.sourceminer.com

The guy was having a rant about a feature that has been stripped out of Kaseya 6 in relation to some CPU process utilisation monitor he does with K5. Anyway, reminded me of a tool I’ve been using for some time that you’re probably not aware of that you absolutely should be using!

The tool is called Threadmaster (yes the tripod.com URL looks dodgy but the tool is legit) and it can cap/throttle CPU utilisation for individual processes on a Windows box.

I initially came across Threadmaster as one of my bigger clients manages a Citrix farm that’s running a bunch of dodgy industry specific apps – regularly individual processes spin out of control and chew 100% CPU on the box, effectively killing the other Citrix sessions on the box and requiring a hard boot before the machine is usable again. This was contributing to large amounts of wasted helpdesk time as well as a lot of frustration from the 20-30 Citrix users that were sitting on that box at the time the process went nuts.

Anyway, after deploying Threadmaster across the farm and tweaking different bandwidth limits the problems went away – from there, we deployed Threadmaster across all Citrix & TS boxes they managed as well as a couple of other servers that were causing problems and again on those machines, occasional problems with CPU spinning out of control went away.

So anyway, check the tool out, give it a shot – it’s simple to deploy and relatively straightforward to manage, although you need to be comfortable digging around in the registry. Also, it doesn’t solve the problem of CPU usage as the out of control process will still chew all available CPU upto the limit you set, but at the very least users on the box will still be able to work and if you use Threadmaster in conjunction with some decent CPU/server performance monitoring sets and processes, you’ll pickup heavy load through monitoring and be able to rectify the problem before the customer complains!

Threadmaster CPU Usage tool – http://threadmaster.tripod.com/

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