Author Archives: brucedawson

About brucedawson

I'm a programmer, working for Google, focusing on optimization and reliability. Nothing's more fun than making code run 10x as fast. Unless it's eliminating large numbers of bugs. I also unicycle. And play (ice) hockey. And sled hockey. And juggle. And worry about whether this blog should have been called randomutf-8. 2010s in review tells more: https://twitter.com/BruceDawson0xB/status/1212101533015298048

When Debug Symbols Get Large

Posted on March 8, 2023 by brucedawson

TL;DR – upgrade your tools, including Visual Studio, windbg, and Windows Performance Toolkit, if you want to handle Chromium’s symbol files. Details: Death, taxes, and browser engines relentlessly growing – those are the three things that you can really be … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Programming, Symbols, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , | 10 Comments

No Start Menu for You

Posted on January 17, 2023 by brucedawson

I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the <Win> key, then a few letters of the program name, and then hitting enter. On my powerful laptop (SSD and 32 GB of RAM) this process … Continue reading →

Posted in Code Reliability, Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Rants, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , , | 28 Comments

Compiler Tricks to Avoid ABI-Induced Crashes

Posted on December 14, 2022 by brucedawson

Last month I wrote about an odd crash that was hitting a few Chrome users. Something was corrupting the XMM7 register and that was causing Chrome to crash. We fixed a couple of bugs in Chrome and we were able … Continue reading →

Posted in Chromium, Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Symbols | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Please Restore Our Registers When You’re Done With Them

Posted on November 21, 2022 by brucedawson

“Hey, you. Yes you, that function over there. When you’re cleaning up please remember to restore all of my registers. Yes, that one too – what do you think this is, Linux?” That’s the problem I was dealing with in … Continue reading →

Posted in Chromium, Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Symbols | Tagged , , | 25 Comments

Why Modern Software is Slow–Windows Voice Recorder

Posted on September 29, 2022 by brucedawson

I apologize for this title because there are many things that can make modern software slow. Blindly applying one explanation without a bit of investigation is the software equivalent of a cargo cult. That said, this post describes one example … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , , | 33 Comments

Slower Memory Zeroing Through Parallelism

Posted on July 11, 2022 by brucedawson

While investigating some performance mysteries in Chrome I discovered that Microsoft had parallelized how they zero memory, and in some cases this was making it a lot slower. This slowdown may be mitigated in Windows 11 but in the latest … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, uiforetw | Tagged , | 11 Comments

11 mm in 1.25 nanoseconds

Posted on January 12, 2022 by brucedawson

In 2004 I was working for Microsoft in the Xbox group, and a new console was being created. I got a copy of the detailed descriptions of the Xbox 360 CPU and I read it through multiple times and suddenly … Continue reading →

Posted in Fun, Performance, Xbox 360 | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Determinism Bugs, Part Two, Kernel32.dll

Posted on January 6, 2022 by brucedawson

It was literally the day after I cracked the __FILE__ determinism bug that I hit a completely different build determinism issue. I was asked to investigate why the Chrome build number reported for Chrome crashes on Windows 11 was lagging … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Chromium, Computers and Internet, Investigative Reporting, Programming, Symbols | Tagged , , | 19 Comments

Two Deterministic Build Bugs

Posted on January 4, 2022 by brucedawson

‘Twas the week before Christmas and I ran across a deterministic-build bug. And then another one. One was in Chromium, and the other was in Microsoft Windows. It seemed like a weird coincidence so I thought I’d write about both … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Chromium, Computers and Internet, Debugging, Programming | Tagged , , | 14 Comments

Windows Performance Analyzer, From Store or SDK

Posted on November 12, 2021 by brucedawson

ETW is the best way to analyze performance on Windows, and Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) has been the preferred tool for analyzing ETW traces for ten years now, generally obtained either by running UIforETW or by getting it from the … Continue reading →

Posted in Documentation, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments