The last (but not the least) element which influences the performance of the application is the kind of hardware on which it is running. If you want to check how much a single hardware resource is used by your application, you can use some common tools and utilities which are usually installed on your machine. Generally speaking, Unix systems have a greater set of built-in commands which are available to monitor your host. Windows users can, however, get an adequate amount of utilities with a simple search on the net and we will guide the reader to some good choices.
One of the most useful applications is the Performance Monitor, which can be used to track a wide range of attributes of your machine and give it a real time graphical display of results. The performance monitor can be run by opening the control panel and clicking Performance and Maintenance | Administrative Tools | Performance (Windows XP).

There you can add new counters on your...