Tip of the Day: Wait Chain Analyzer

Today’s Tip…

I work primarily on Setup technologies, and so, have had very little chance to use the Resource Manager on Windows Server 2008/2008 R2. However, while playing around with the task manager on Windows 8, I found something that was only available on the Resource Manager earlier, which I found quite helpful while troubleshooting some issues on my personal system.

On Windows Server 2008/2008 R2, the Resource Manager provided a “Wait Chain Analyzer”…

<screen shot of the resource manager on 2008 R2 >

clip_image001

This was not available on the task manager.

With Windows 8, the “Analyze Wait Chain” option has been moved to the process information on the details tab of the task manager.

<screenshot from the task manager on Win8>

clip_image002

This makes it more easier to access the Wait Chain of a process as compared to accessing it through the resource manager, and to understand where a process is waiting… very frequently (and in my experience) while troubleshooting an installation issue, this can really help us understand exactly what process we need to concentrate on.