-
Recent Posts
Categories
- AltDevBlogADay
- Bugs
- Chromium
- Code analysis
- Code Reliability
- Commuting
- Computers and Internet
- Debugging
- Documentation
- Drinks
- Environment
- Floating Point
- Fractals
- Fun
- Gaming
- Investigative Reporting
- Linux
- Math
- memory
- Performance
- Programming
- Quadratic
- Rants
- Security
- Symbols
- Travel
- uiforetw
- Uncategorized
- Unicycling
- Visual Studio
- WLPG
- Xbox 360
- xperf
Follow me on Twitter
My TweetsMeta
Category Archives: Investigative Reporting
A Not-Called Function Can Cause a 5X Slowdown
Subtitle: Making Windows Slower Part 3: Process Destruction In the summer of 2017 I wrestled with a Windows performance problem. Process destruction was slow, serialized, and was blocking the system input queue, leading to repeated short mouse-movement hangs when building … Continue reading
Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming
Tagged GDI, process shutdown, UserCrit
Leave a comment
Making Windows Slower Part 2: Process Creation
Windows has long had a reputation for slow file operations and slow process creation. Have you ever wanted to make these operations even slower? This weeks’ blog post covers a technique you can use to make process creation on Windows … Continue reading
Posted in Code Reliability, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Quadratic
Tagged Application Verifier, crashing, pageheap
7 Comments
24-core CPU and I can’t type an email (part two)
In my last post I promised to give more details about some rabbit holes that I went down during the investigation, including page tables, locks, WMI, and a vmmap bug. Those details are here, along with updated code samples. But … Continue reading
Posted in Investigative Reporting, memory, Performance
Tagged cfg, chrome, control flow guard, vmmap
16 Comments
24-core CPU and I can’t type an email (part one)
I wasn’t looking for trouble. I wasn’t trying to compile a huge project in the background (24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse), I was just engaging in that most mundane of 21st century tasks, writing an email at … Continue reading
Posted in Investigative Reporting, memory, Performance
Tagged cfg, chrome, control flow guard, vmmap
28 Comments
Making Windows Slower Part 1: File Access
Windows has long had a reputation for slow file operations and slow process creation. Have you ever wanted to make these operations even slower? This weeks’ blog post covers a technique you can use to make all file operations on … Continue reading
Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, xperf
Tagged FileSystemWatcher, notifications, Windows
18 Comments
Compiler bug? Linker bug? Windows Kernel bug.
See the end of the post for an October 2018 bug fix update, or read the whole story: Flaky failures are the worst. In this particular investigation, which spanned twenty months, we suspected hardware failure, compiler bugs, linker bugs, and … Continue reading
Posted in Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Programming
Tagged ETW, kernel, linking, Windows
57 Comments
Zombie Processes are Eating your Memory
Zombies probably won’t consume 32 GB of your memory like they did to me, but zombie processes do exist, and I can help you find them and make sure that developers fix them. Tool source link is at the bottom. … Continue reading
Posted in Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Rants
Tagged handles, leaks, zombies
74 Comments
Hey Synaptics, Can You Please Stop Polling!
TL;DR – be wary of buying a Lenovo laptop or any other laptop that uses a Synaptics touch pad until Synaptics ships a fixed driver. Their driver has a memory leak and they have a battery-life bug that causes Windows … Continue reading
Posted in Investigative Reporting, Uncategorized
30 Comments
What is Windows *doing* while hogging that lock
Earlier this month I wrote about how Windows 10 holds a lock during too much of process destruction, which both serializes this task and causes mouse-cursor hitches and UI hangs (because the same lock is used for these UI tasks). … Continue reading
Posted in Investigative Reporting, uiforetw, xperf
Tagged UI hangs, wait analysis, WIndows 10
12 Comments
24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse
This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and that … Continue reading
Posted in Investigative Reporting, uiforetw, xperf
Tagged UI hangs, wait analysis, WIndows 10
209 Comments