Category Archives: Programming

Heap Snapshots–Tracing All Heap Allocations

Posted on October 27, 2019 by

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 , | 8 Comments

63 Cores Blocked by Seven Instructions

Posted on October 20, 2019 by

I seem to have a habit of writing about super powerful machines whose many cores are laid low by misuse of locks. So. Yeah. It’s that again. But this one seems particularly impressive. I mean, how often do you have … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , , | 24 Comments

When Your Profiler Lies

Posted on December 9, 2018 by

Last week I wrote about the performance consequences of inadvertently loading gdi32.dll into processes that are created and destroyed at very high rates. This week I want to share some techniques for digging deeper into this behavior, and the odd … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , , | 20 Comments

A Not-Called Function Can Cause a 5X Slowdown

Posted on December 3, 2018 by

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 , , | 13 Comments

Making Windows Slower Part 2: Process Creation

Posted on October 15, 2018 by

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 | Tagged , , | 18 Comments

Making Windows Slower Part 1: File Access

Posted on April 17, 2018 by

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 , , | 25 Comments

Compiler bug? Linker bug? Windows Kernel bug.

Posted on February 25, 2018 by

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 , , , | 65 Comments