Category Archives: Performance

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 , , | 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

Arranging Invisible Icons in Quadratic Time

Posted on February 16, 2021 by brucedawson

Near the end of January I was pointed to a twitter thread where a Windows user with a powerful machine was hitting random hangs in explorer. Lots of unscientific theories were being proposed. I don’t generally do random analysis of … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Quadratic, Rants, Symbols | Tagged , | 18 Comments

Windows Timer Resolution: The Great Rule Change

Posted on October 4, 2020 by brucedawson

The behavior of the Windows scheduler changed significantly in Windows 10 2004 (aka, the April 2020 version of Windows), in a way that will break a few applications, and there appears to have been no announcement, and the documentation has … Continue reading →

Posted in Environment, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Rants | Tagged , | 77 Comments

The Easy Ones – Three Bugs Hiding in the Open

Posted on August 30, 2020 by brucedawson

I write a lot about investigations into tricky bugs – CPU defects, kernel bugs, transient 4-GB memory allocations – but most bugs are not that esoteric. Sometimes tracking down a bug is as simple as paying attention to server dashboards, … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Code analysis, Code Reliability, Debugging, Floating Point, Linux, Performance | Tagged | 17 Comments

What Outranks Thread Priority?

Posted on April 14, 2020 by brucedawson

This investigation started, as so many of mine do, with me minding my own business, not looking for trouble. In this case all I was doing was opening my laptop lid and trying to log on. The first few times … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Big Project Build Times–Chromium

Posted on March 30, 2020 by brucedawson

A twitter discussion on build times and source-file sizes got me interested in doing some analysis of Chromium build times. I had some ideas about what I would find (lots of small source files causing much of the build time) … Continue reading →

Posted in Chromium, Performance, Programming | Tagged , | 23 Comments

Heap Snapshots–Tracing All Heap Allocations

Posted on October 27, 2019 by brucedawson

I’ve recently started using heap snapshots on Windows to track heap allocations. I was able to use heap snapshots to record call stacks for all outstanding allocations in Chrome’s browser process over a full two weeks, letting me account for … Continue reading →

Posted in Documentation, Performance, Programming, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , | 23 Comments