Writing Windows performance counters

[Mark Hammond]

David Mitchell wrote:

> Could someone point me towards some sample code that creates performance
> counters and updates them?  I suspect it's possible using perfmondata.dll
> that comes with win32all, but can't begin to guess how to get started.

I thought there was sample code in win32all, but it looks like it never 
got created - but 1/2 of it is there.

The win32\demos\service\install directory has a .h and a .ini file that 
are used by Windows itself when installing the perfmon data.

Somewhere, your runtime code should implement code similar to:

counters = [] # Empty list to fill with counters.

# Counter of document opens.
# Magic numbers (2, 4, 6) must match header and ini file used
# at install - could lookup ini, but then I'd need it at runtime
counterSomething=perfmon.CounterDefinition(2)
counterSomething.DefaultScale = 1
counters.append(counterSomething)

counterSomethingElse=perfmon.CounterDefinition(4)
counterSomethingElse.DefaultScale = 1
counters.append(counterDocSave)

perfObjectType = perfmon.ObjectType(counters)

# end of sample

The magic numbers must match the .h and .ini (which is a requirement of 
Windows, not us!)  Once the above code has been run, 'counterSomething' 
and 'counterSomethingElse' can have their 'Increment' method called, to 
increment the counter.

Note that I don't try and hide the win32 gory details here, so you 
really must read the MS documentation on this complicated mechanism.

Let me know if you would like any help.  A very useful thing to do would 
be to create a sub-class of the existing demo service, with the subclass 
doing nothing other than providing the perfmon data.  This was always my 
intent.  If you have trouble getting it going, providing the above as 
sample code to demonstrate your problem would get a good response ;)

Mark.