Tag Archives: Windows

What Outranks Thread Priority?

Posted on April 14, 2020 by brucedawson

This investigation started, as so many of mine do, with me minding my own business, not looking for trouble. In this case all I was doing was opening my laptop lid and trying to log on. The first few times … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Making Windows Slower Part 1: File Access

Posted on April 17, 2018 by brucedawson

Windows has long had a reputation for slow file operations and slow process creation. Have you ever wanted to make these operations even slower? This weeks’ blog post covers a technique you can use to make all file operations on … Continue reading →

Posted in Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, xperf | Tagged , , | 18 Comments

Compiler bug? Linker bug? Windows Kernel bug.

Posted on February 25, 2018 by brucedawson

See the end of the post for an October 2018 bug fix update, or read the whole story: Flaky failures are the worst. In this particular investigation, which spanned twenty months, we suspected hardware failure, compiler bugs, linker bugs, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Investigative Reporting, Programming | Tagged , , , | 57 Comments

Thread Naming in Windows: Time for Something Better

Posted on October 26, 2015 by brucedawson

Windows lets you give names to the threads in your process which can then be displayed by debuggers. This is a great idea, but the implementation is showing its age – it’s time for some fixes, or something better. Update, … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Programming, Visual Studio | Tagged , , , | 16 Comments

timeGetTime versus GetTickCount

Posted on May 9, 2013 by brucedawson

I have a confession to make – I only just found out the difference between the Windows functions GetTickCount and timeGetTime. I know what you’re thinking – I’m a game developer and I should know better than that. But I … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, Programming | Tagged , | 18 Comments

Sleep Variation Investigated

Posted on April 2, 2013 by brucedawson

I recently saw a blog post covering how Sleep(n) works on various Windows operating systems and it showed slight variations in sleep times, between and within operating systems. The unanswered questions were: Why does the sleep time vary between operating … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, xperf | Tagged , , , , , , | 27 Comments