Sitecore has no necessary permissions for reading/creating counters

Question

In the Sitecore (6.6 v130404) log file there are so many "Sitecore has no necessary permissions for reading/creating counters." records being created. I have disabled the performance counters in the server.

 <!--  ENABLE COUNTERS
                Indicates if performance counters are enabled.
                Default value: true
  -->

<setting name="Counters.Enabled" value="false"/>

Log extract: (For every 6seconds this keeps updating the log)

Heartbeat 19:07:33 WARN  Sitecore has no necessary permissions for reading/creating counters.
Heartbeat 19:07:39 WARN  Sitecore has no necessary permissions for reading/creating counters.
Heartbeat 19:07:45 WARN  Sitecore has no necessary permissions for reading/creating counters.
Heartbeat 19:07:51 WARN  Sitecore has no necessary permissions for reading/creating counters.

I have modified the following webconfig setting and set the value as 1hour, as the above log mentions that it's related to a heartbeat setting.

This solved the problem. I have Googled for any effects with this change in this setting, found no results on this. Is this ok to set this setting to 1hour? What is the purpose of this setting?

Answer 1

A Sitecore application pool user (most probably Network Service user) has to be a member of the system “Performance Monitor Users” group to have access to the mentioned registry key. Adding the user to this group and restarting IIS should solve the problem.