Performance By Design

Continuing the discussion from the previous blog entry on event-driven approaches to measuring CPU utilization in Windows ... Besides measuring processor utilization at the system level, the stream of context switch events can also be re-constructed to drill into CPU consumption at the process and thread level. An exemplary example of this approach is the Visual Studio Profiler’s Concurrency Visualizer, available in Visual Studio 2010. (For reference, see “Performance Tuning with the Concurrency Visualizer in Visual Studio 2010 in the Visual Studio 2010 Profiler,” an MSDN Magazine article written by the tool’s principal architect, Hazim Shafi.)   The Concurrency Visualizer gathers Context Switch events to calculate processor utilization for the application being profiled. The VS Concurrency Visualizer creates a system-level CPU Utilization View with an interesting twist – the view pivots based on the application you are profiling, a perspective that matches that of a softw...

I cannot resist adding to some of the industry buzz about the recent HP Project Moonshot announcement and what this potentially means for folks that run Windows. As part of Project Moonshot, HP is planning to release something called the Redstone Server Development Platform in 1H12, an ARM-based, massively parallel supercomputer that uses 90% less energy than comparable Intel microprocessors. Coupled with the big.Little hardware announcement from the ARM Consortium about two weeks ago, I think this is big news that could shake up the foundations of Windows computing. ARM-based Windows Server machines could well be in all our futures. Let’s start with ARM and the big.Little architecture announcement, which is pretty interesting in itself. Details are from this white paper . big.Little is an explicit multi-core architecture where a simple, low power version of the processor is packaged together with a significantly more powerful (~ 2x) version of the processor that also uses about...

Continuing the discussion from the previous blog entry on event-driven approaches to measuring CPU utilization in Windows ... Last time around I discussed the same CPU busy calculations that the Resource Manager in Windows 6 & 7 makes. This same calculation can also be performed after the fact using the event data from ETW. This is the technique used in the Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT, but which is better known around Microsoft as xperf), for example, to calculate CPU usage metrics. Once you have downloaded and installed the Windows Performance Toolkit, you can launch a basic ETW collection session using the following xperf command: xperf -on DiagEasy Then, after you have accumulated enough data, issue another command to stop tracing and capture the event stream to a file: xperf -d cputrace.etl Next, process the cputrace.etl file using the xperfview app. After the trace file is loaded, xperfview provides visualizations that are very similar to ResMon. ...