Target audience

Novice users   Intermediate users   Power users   System administrators   Support engineers   Application developers   Kernel developers   Audio professionals

An in-depth look into the Windows dispatcher

The dispatcher (also known as scheduler) is part of the Windows kernel executive responsible for scheduling units of executions among available processors. Units of execution can be threads that belong to a process but also involves ISRs (interrupt service routines) which execute on behalf of either a hardware or software interrupt and DPCs (deferred procedure calls) which are routines of execution scheduled by the kernel.


This software gives an in-depth look into what is actually running on your processors.

DispatchMon will monitor the following activities:

Thread execution




This software supplies time stamps of each activity but does not measure actual execution time of each routine. If you are interested in execution times of ISRs, DPCs and hard pagefaults you should take a look at our LatencyMon utility.

Supported operating systems

DispatchMon runs on the following operating systems: