Tag Archives: memory

32 MiB Working Sets on a 64 GiB machine

Posted on October 1, 2023 by brucedawson

Memory is a relatively scarce resource on many consumer computers, so a feature to limit how much memory a process uses seems like a good idea, and Microsoft did indeed implement such a feature. However: They didn’t document this (!) … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers and Internet, Investigative Reporting, memory, Performance, Programming, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Slower Memory Zeroing Through Parallelism

Posted on July 11, 2022 by brucedawson

While investigating some performance mysteries in Chrome I discovered that Microsoft had parallelized how they zero memory, and in some cases this was making it a lot slower. This slowdown may be mitigated in Windows 11 but in the latest … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, uiforetw | Tagged , | 13 Comments

Heap Snapshots–Tracing All Heap Allocations

Posted on October 27, 2019 by brucedawson

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 , | 23 Comments

ETW Heap Tracing–Every Allocation Recorded

Posted on April 27, 2015 by brucedawson

Event Tracing for Windows (ETW, aka xperf) is usually used to monitor CPU usage, through its sampling profiler and its ability to record detailed information about context switches. Well, ETW is also used to monitor file I/O, and disk I/O, … Continue reading →

Posted in memory, xperf | Tagged , , | 35 Comments

50 Bytes of Code That Took 4 GB to Compile

Posted on August 14, 2013 by brucedawson

While doing evil things with macros and the inline assembler (trying to run a weird test whose purpose is not really relevant) I managed to write a program that caused Visual Studio’s C++ compiler to allocate 4 GB of memory … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Programming, Visual Studio, xperf | Tagged | 37 Comments