Tag Archives: performance

O(n^2), again, now in WMI

Posted on December 8, 2019 by brucedawson

I recently hit some multi-minute delays on my workstation. After investigating I found that the problem was due to a lock being held for five minutes, and during that time the lock-holder was mostly just spinning in a nine-instruction loop. … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Programming, Quadratic, Rants, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , , , , | 23 Comments

ETW Central

Posted on September 24, 2015 by brucedawson

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 →

Posted in uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , , , , | 41 Comments

The Surprising Subtleties of Zeroing a Register

Posted on December 29, 2012 by brucedawson

Zeroing out a CPU register seems like the simplest and most basic operation imaginable, but in fact x86 CPUs contain a surprising amount of special logic to make this operation run smoothly. The most obvious way of zeroing an x86 … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, Programming | Tagged , , , | 18 Comments