Getting system “load” on Windows

Question

I'm looking for a way to get the current "load" (as in Unix: The number of processes which are waiting for the CPU/data) on Windows. Is that possible at all?

Background: By default, Windows will tell you how much the CPU is utilized or the network traffic, RAM used, etc. From a performance point of view, this is useless. I don't care that 97% of my CPU is idle when the virus scanner blocks my IDE. I want to know whether processes are blocked waiting for some resource.

Answer 1

System\Processor Queue Length counter will tell you how many threads are waiting for CPU resources. LogicalDisk\Current Disk Queue Length will tell you how many requests are pending disk I/O.

EDIT: You can graph these values using "Reliability and Performance Monitor" in Vista or "perfmon.exe" on XP. Unix gives you time-averaged values over various intervals; perfmon has a averaged counters (configurable sample interval for all counters together) or you can just get a snapshot of the current queue. I don't think there is a way to the a EMA (exponential moving average) like Unix gives you.