Flaky failures are the worst. In this particular investigation, which spanned twenty months, we suspected hardware failure, compiler bugs, linker bugs, and other possibilities. Jumping too quickly to blaming hardware or build tools is a classic mistake, but in this … Continue reading
TL;DR – I can finally record CPU performance counters for processes on Windows. I’m mostly a Windows developer but I’ll occasionally fire up my Linux box to use the perf tool to examine CPU performance counters. Sometimes you really need … Continue reading
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
Over the last few years I’ve written over forty blog posts that discuss ETW/xperf profiling. I’ve done this because it’s one of the best profilers I’ve ever used, and it’s been woefully undersold and under documented by Microsoft. My goal … Continue reading
If your Windows computer is running slowly – if a program takes a long time to launch, if a game has a poor frame rate, or if an idle application uses too much CPU time – the best way to … Continue reading
Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) aka xperf is an amazing tool for investigating the performance of Windows machines – I’ve blogged about it many times and it’s helped me find some amazing issues. But recording ETW traces has always been … Continue reading
I created 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 experienced programmer how to use … Continue reading
