Counter of type RateOfCountsPerSecond32 always shows 0

Question

I have a windows service that serves messages of some virtual queue via a WCF service interface. I wanted to expose two performance counters -

1. The number of items on the queue
2. The number of items removed from the queue per second

The first one works fine, the second one always shows as 0 in PerfMon.exe, despite the RawValue appearing to be correct.

I'm creating the counters as such -

    internal const string PERF_COUNTERS_CATEGORY = "HRG.Test.GDSSimulator";
    internal const string PERF_COUNTER_ITEMSINQUEUE_COUNTER = "# Messages on queue";
    internal const string PERF_COUNTER_PNR_PER_SECOND_COUNTER = "# Messages read / sec";

if (!PerformanceCounterCategory.Exists(PERF_COUNTERS_CATEGORY))
{
    System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine("Creating performance counter category: " + PERF_COUNTERS_CATEGORY);
    CounterCreationDataCollection counters = new CounterCreationDataCollection();

    CounterCreationData numberOfMessagesCounter = new CounterCreationData();
    numberOfMessagesCounter.CounterHelp = "This counter provides the number of messages exist in each simulated queue";
    numberOfMessagesCounter.CounterName = PERF_COUNTER_ITEMSINQUEUE_COUNTER;
    numberOfMessagesCounter.CounterType = PerformanceCounterType.NumberOfItems32;
    counters.Add(numberOfMessagesCounter);

    CounterCreationData messagesPerSecondCounter= new CounterCreationData();
    messagesPerSecondCounter.CounterHelp = "This counter provides the number of messages read from the queue per second";
    messagesPerSecondCounter.CounterName = PERF_COUNTER_PNR_PER_SECOND_COUNTER;
    messagesPerSecondCounter.CounterType = PerformanceCounterType.RateOfCountsPerSecond32;
    counters.Add(messagesPerSecondCounter);

    PerformanceCounterCategory.Create(PERF_COUNTERS_CATEGORY, "HRG Queue Simulator performance counters", PerformanceCounterCategoryType.MultiInstance,counters);
}

Then, on each service call, I increment the relevant counter, for the per/sec counter this currently looks like this -

messagesPerSecCounter = new PerformanceCounter();
messagesPerSecCounter.CategoryName = QueueSimulator.PERF_COUNTERS_CATEGORY;
messagesPerSecCounter.CounterName = QueueSimulator.PERF_COUNTER_PNR_PER_SECOND_COUNTER;
messagesPerSecCounter.MachineName = ".";
messagesPerSecCounter.InstanceName = this.ToString().ToLower();
messagesPerSecCounter.ReadOnly = false;

messagesPerSecCounter.Increment();

As mentioned - if I put a breakpoint after the call to increment I can see the RawValue constantly increasing, in consistence with the calls to the service (fairly frequently, more than once a second, I would think) But the performance counter itself stays on 0.

The performance counter providing the count of items on the 'queue', which is implemented in the same way (although I assign the RawValue, rather than call Increment) works just fine.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

I had the same problem. In my testing, I believe I was seeing the issue was some combination of multi instance and rate of count per second. If I used single instance or a number of items counter it worked. Something about that combination of multi instance and rate per second caused it to be always zero.

As Performance counter of type RateOfCountsPerSecond64 has always the value 0 mentions, a reboot may do the trick. Worked for me anyway.

Another thing that worked for me was this initializing the counter in a block like this:

counter.BeginInit();
counter.RawValue = 0;
counter.EndInit();