How to find percentage of CPU time consumed during DMA operation?

Question

DMA (direct memory access) is a platform-independent method for transferring data between CPU and main system RAM. DMA operations are typically faster than normal memory accesses because the CPU doesn’t have to wait for the operating system to finish loading the required physical address into its registers before it can read or write data.

DMA operations are used to transfer data between the CPU and peripherals, such as hard drives or flash memory. DMA can be resource intensive, depending on the type of data being transferred. You can use Performance Monitor in Windows 10 to measure how much CPU time is consumed by various tasks and then identify which task consumes the most amount of resources.

To do this, open Performance Monitor by searching for “Performance Monitor” in start menu and clicking on it. Next, select ‘Devices’ from the left-hand column and right-click on any device name under it to get additional options like ‘Perfmon Data Collector Script’. Click on ‘Create Basic Collection Set’ button next to your target disk (for example C:), set a collection interval (say every 5 minutes) and click ‘Start’. The script will start capturing performance information automatically and you’ll see detailed report with percent cpu time spent during each stage of operation including DMA transfers at runtime.

To find out how much of your CPU time is consumed by DMA operations, you can use Task Manager’s Performance tab. Click on “Processes” and then select “Dma”. This will display a list of all active DMA tasks, as well as their associated percentages of total processor time.

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