Category Archives: xperf

Profiling the profiler: working around a six minute xperf hang

Posted on March 2, 2015 by

Anytime my computer is a little bit slow I’m likely to record a trace and take a quick look. If I’m lucky I’ll find an easy workaround, in which case I’ve got a potential blog post and a smoother running … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, xperf | Tagged , | 6 Comments

ETW Trace Compression (and xperf syntax refresher)

Posted on March 2, 2015 by

Despite extolling the virtues of wprui for recording ETW traces (here, and here) I’ve actually returned to using xperf.exe in batch files to do most of my trace recording. It gives me more precise control over what is recorded, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, Programming, xperf | Tagged , | 13 Comments

Hidden Costs of Memory Allocation

Posted on December 10, 2014 by

It’s important to understand the cost of memory allocations, but this cost can be surprisingly tricky to measure. It seems reasonable to measure this cost by wrapping calls to new[] and delete[] with timers. However, for large buffers these timers … Continue reading →

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

Slow Symbol Loading in Microsoft’s Profiler, Take Two

Posted on November 4, 2014 by

When I run into a problematically slow program I immediately reach for a profiler so that I can understand the problem and either fix it or work around it. This guidance applies even when the slow program is a profiler. … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, xperf | Tagged , , , , | 16 Comments

ETW Training Videos Available Now

Posted on August 19, 2014 by

I just finished creating the third in a series of training videos that cover Event Tracing for Windows, also known as xperf or the Windows Performance Toolkit. This set of videos, available on WintellectNow, should be enough to teach any … Continue reading →

Posted in xperf | Tagged , , , | 30 Comments

Self Inflicted Denial of Service in Visual Studio Search

Posted on April 15, 2014 by

After upgrading to Visual Studio 2013 I noticed that find-in-files had a problem when searching directories. The VS IDE would repeatedly hang, rendering it completely useless for the duration of the search. I filed a bug, complete with ETW traces … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, Visual Studio, xperf | Tagged , | 7 Comments

You Got Your Web Browser in my Compiler!

Posted on March 31, 2014 by

I recently discovered that Microsoft’s VC++ compiler loads mshtml.dll – also known as Internet Explorer. The compiler does this whenever the /analyze option (requesting static code analysis) is used. I’m no compiler architecture expert, but a compiler that loads Internet … Continue reading →

Posted in Code analysis, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Visual Studio, xperf | Tagged , , , | 66 Comments