Category Archives: uiforetw

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 , , | 259 Comments

WPA Symbol Loading is Much Faster, but Broken for Chrome

Posted on November 7, 2016 by

There’s good news, and there’s bad news. The good news is that the latest Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA), the visualization tool for ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) traces, can now load symbols faster than ever before – it’s multi-threaded, and … Continue reading →

Posted in uiforetw | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

ETW Flame Graphs Made Easy

Posted on September 5, 2016 by

A bit over three years ago I wrote about how to use flame graphs to visualize CPU Usage (Sampled) data from ETW, and a year ago I added flame graph support to UIforETW. However these techniques are clumsy and slow … Continue reading →

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

UIforETW is No Longer a CPU Hog

Posted on May 12, 2016 by

A few months ago I wrote about how many processes on my system were waking up and wasting CPU time for no good reason, thus wasting battery power, electricity, and CPU power. I was surprised that nobody called me out … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Power Wastage On An Idle Laptop

Posted on March 8, 2016 by

Ever since I upgraded to Windows 10 it’s felt like my battery life is worse. My suspicion was various scanning tasks that were springing to life more frequently, but it was just a hunch. So, I did what I do … Continue reading →

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