Tag Archives: CPU sampling

Xperf for Excess CPU Consumption: WPA edition

Posted on April 23, 2013 by brucedawson

Last year I wrote an article about how to use xperf to analyze a CPU bound program, using the xperfview UI. Since then the WPA UI has come out and replaced xperfview. This updated version of the article explains how … Continue reading →

Posted in xperf | Tagged , , , | 13 Comments

Summarizing Xperf CPU Usage with Flame Graphs

Posted on March 26, 2013 by brucedawson

Xperf is a powerful (and free) Windows profiler that provides amazing insights into what is constraining the performance of Windows programs. Xperf includes a sampling profiler and a very capable viewer of the sampled call stacks (see below for UIforETW … Continue reading →

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

The Lost Xperf Documentation–CPU sampling

Posted on May 8, 2012 by brucedawson

Xperf (Windows Performance Toolkit, also known as ETW) is a powerful tool for investigating performance issues, however it is a challenging tool to use. Some of this difficulty comes from intrinsic complexity – in order to fully investigate thread scheduling … Continue reading →

Posted in Documentation, Performance, Programming, xperf | Tagged , , , | 24 Comments

Xperf for Excess CPU Consumption

Posted on September 3, 2011 by brucedawson

When an application is slow you can, in my experience, generally categorize the problem as CPU bound or CPU idle. Either the CPU is spending an annoyingly long time on computing some result, or the CPU is idle, waiting on … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, xperf | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments