When problems occur with a SharePoint Portal Server, your first instinct is probably to look at the Event Viewer. While the Event Viewer can certainly provide some useful information, you might be surprised to learn that another good source of troubleshooting information is the Performance Monitor. Microsoft has included several Performance Monitor counters that are specific to SharePoint. In this article, I’ll review a few of the many SharePoint performance Monitor counters that are useful in troubleshooting situations.
Microsoft GathererHeartbeats
This service displays the number of heartbeats that have occurred since the SharePoint services were started. By default, a heartbeat occurs every ten seconds. If you see that the heartbeats aren’t increasing, it means that the SharePoint services have either stopped or are unresponsive.
Microsoft GathererReason To Back Off
Check this counter to see if its value is higher than zero. A non zero number means that document crawling has been paused because of insufficient system resources. Usually a non zero value indicates that the system is low on memory or that the current disk IO is too high to process requests.
Microsoft Search Indexer CatalogsNumber of Documents
Another useful counter is the Number of Documents counter. The Number of Documents counter reports the number of documents in the catalogue. This is useful for seeing how heavily the SharePoint server is being used. For example, you can tell over time if the number of indexed documents remains fairly static, goes up, or even goes down. This is a really good counter to check out if you start having disk space problems.
Microsoft Search Indexer CatalogsIndex Size
This counter reports the size of the document index in megabytes. If you watch this counter over time, you can track the rate at which the index is growing, and can use that information to predict how quickly your server may run out of hard disk space.
Microsoft GathererDocuments Delayed Retry
This counter displays a value. Normally, the value should be zero, but a non zero value means that SharePoint is having problems accessing the Web storage system. These failed access attempts will keep retrying until successful. Therefore, if the Documents Delayed Retry value momentarily goes above zero and then goes back down, it means that the system was simply busy at the time of the original request, but later was able to catch up with the demand being placed on it. If however, the number continues to steadily rise, then it indicates a Web storage system failure.
Microsoft GathererActive Queue Length
This counter indicates the number of documents that are waiting for a robot thread to process them. Normally, this number should be zero. If this number is not zero, it means that the server is falling behind, although this may be a temporary condition caused by an especially busy period. If this number is anything other than zero, then all available threads should be filtering. If the number is above zero, but all possible threads aren’t filtering, it usually means that the SharePoint services need to be stopped and restarted.
