Windows Process Explorer…

 

I’m not a big time user of Windows servers, so I often find myself having to rediscover things when I’m forced back on to that platform. An example of this came up today when a colleague of mine was trying to find out which process was locking a particular file on a Windows server.

While Googling for the Windows equivalent of “fuser” I came across the Process Explorer utility from Microsoft. Having found it I remembered that I used a previous version of it for much the same purpose some years ago. A couple of clicks on the menu, “Find > Find Handle or DLL…”, and Bob’s your uncle!

It’s worth a gander if your using Windows and you don’t already use it.

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

2 thoughts on “Windows Process Explorer…”

  1. The other fairly significant thing (from an Oracle point of view) is that that you can see the individual threads within the oracle.exe process.

    You right click the oracle.exe process, choose ‘Properties’, then ‘Threads’

    The Thread Id can then be matched back to the Oracle spid.

    You can just about do the same thing with the Windows Performance Manager (perfmon), but its nowhere near as convenient.

    Cheers

    Matt

  2. Also check out the PS Tools suite of utilities. These can be run from the shell and provide the same information (or nearly the same) as the Process Explorer. I wonder why Windows does not include it instead of Task Manager as the latter not only has a miserable interface but in my experience also displays incorrect information. I found this accidentally when I compared the results with PERMON based logging. The other tool worth checking out is CONTIG which allows defragmentation of individual files (again available from the same site). And yes…killing of processes is a pleasure 🙂 using Process Explorer and the shell equivalent is PSKILL.

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