Category Archives: uiforetw

What Outranks Thread Priority?

Posted on April 14, 2020 by

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 , , | 8 Comments

Creating a Public Symbol Server, Easily

Posted on March 14, 2020 by

I’ve been a big fan of symbol servers for years. They are a part of the Microsoft/Windows ecosystem that is far better than anything I have seen for other operating systems. With Microsoft’s and Chrome’s symbol servers configured I can … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Programming, Symbols, uiforetw | Tagged | 14 Comments

Bulk ETW Trace Analysis in C#

Posted on January 5, 2020 by

ETW traces record a wealth of information about how a Windows system is behaving. When analyzing a new and unknown problem there is no replacement for loading the trace into WPA and following the clues to a solution. The thrill … Continue reading →

Posted in uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , | 11 Comments

O(n^2), again, now in WMI

Posted on December 8, 2019 by

I recently hit some multi-minute delays on my workstation. After investigating I found that the problem was due to a lock being held for five minutes, and during that time the lock-holder was mostly just spinning in a nine-instruction loop. … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Programming, Rants, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , , , , | 45 Comments

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 , | 16 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 , , | 37 Comments

Taskbar Latency and Kernel Calls

Posted on September 8, 2019 by

I work quickly on my computer and I get frustrated when I am forced to wait on an operation that should be fast. A persistent nuisance on my over-powered home laptop is that closing windows on the taskbar is slow. … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , , , | 40 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

What is Windows *doing* while hogging that lock

Posted on July 27, 2017 by

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 , , | 19 Comments

24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

Posted on July 9, 2017 by

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 , , | 264 Comments