processor load incorrect on Windows?

[freemant]

Hi,

I am usin zabbix v1.0. On a Windows 2000 server, the W32 agent reports that the processor load (proc5) is usually quite high, sometimes as high as 5 (ie, 5 processes in the ready queue). But using the Performance monitoring program in Windows 2000, the maximum % of processor utilization is less than 45% in the same period. This is certainly a contradiction. Does it mean that the proc5 metric is incorrect and shouldn't be used?

[dantheman]

just because the processor utilization does not hit 100% does not mean that there can't be items in the queue, they could be there because of limited RAM, or a few other reasons, there was a post at one time explaning this more in depth, but I'm not having any luck finding it right now.

That's my understanding of how it works, if anyone can contribute? (or correct me if I'm wrong!)

[freemant]

Thanks. I've checked when the process queue length was 6, and it had about 100MB memory free, the pages/sec was 0 (hard page faults) and the disk queue was empty. So it was not lacking RAM. What could be wrong?