Performance and Diagnostics

Recording Hardware Performance (PMU) Events with Complete Examples

June 20, 2022 Jun 20, 2022 06/20/22

Sowoon Pyo

Performance Monitor Unit (PMU) events are used to measure CPU performance and understand workloads CPU characterization. Windows provides a way to collect PMU events through Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). When combined with other ETW events, we can tell a lot more concrete story about the performance. I recently added “Recording Hardware ...

Reduce Process Interference with Task Manager Efficiency Mode

February 16, 2022 Feb 16, 2022 02/16/22

Claton Hendricks

Task Manager Efficiency mode is a new feature that gives you options to ensure certain running processes won’t stress the CPU out, leading to faster foreground responsiveness and better energy efficiency. It also helps you to identify apps that are already running in Efficiency Mode and are good citizens of the OS.

New Android logcat support available in Microsoft Performance Tools for Linux & Android

January 13, 2022 Jan 13, 2022 01/13/22

Ivan Berg

We recently added support for parsing Android logcat logs to the OSS Microsoft-Performance-Tools-Linux-Android project. Logcat is a text-based dump of system & app messages on Android. This is what the logcat log would look like when loaded in Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) Logcat for performance Logcat is useful in general, but ...

Perfetto tooling for analyzing Android, Linux, and Chromium browser performance – Microsoft-Performance-Tools-Linux-Android

December 8, 2021 Dec 8, 2021 12/8/21

Ivan Berg

Introduction In the last blog post, we introduced the cross platform open-source .NET Core Microsoft-Performance-Tools-Linux-Android tooling. Recently, we just released version 1.2 adding Perfetto support, which we will cover here. Perfetto is Google’s open-source tracing ecosystem covering Linux kernel tracing (and user-mode) and ...

New tools for analyzing Android, Linux, and Chromium browser performance – Microsoft-Performance-Tools for Linux-Android

December 7, 2021 Dec 7, 2021 12/7/21

Ivan Berg

Introducing the Microsoft Performance Tools for Linux & Android

Authoring Custom Profile – Part 3

November 8, 2021 Nov 8, 2021 11/8/21

Sowoon Pyo

This blog post explains EventProvider element in WPR profile and its child elements and attributes. Among many elements of the profile, EventProvider is the most used element and most configurable.

SizeBench: a new tool for analyzing Windows binary size

September 27, 2021 Sep 27, 2021 09/27/21

Austin Lamb

A new tool called SizeBench has been released to the Microsoft Store, which helps with understanding binary size on Windows. This static analysis tool can break down a binary in many ways, and has heuristic analyses to look for likely sources of waste, and this blog post goes on a tour of what the tool can do.

WPA: Table & Graph Configurations (Part 2)

June 28, 2021 Jun 28, 2021 06/28/21

Tristan Gibeau

In Part 1, we discussed the different types of columns options available in WPA's table views and how those views can be configured. This blog will continue the series by digging into how to configure columns for different graph styles that can show numeric aggregations, time, and hierarchical data: Graphing Overview ...

Setting up an autologger with WPR

June 25, 2021 Jun 25, 2021 06/25/21

Sowoon Pyo

WPR supports configuring an autologger. Setting up the autologger and collecting the autologger trace is as easy as starting/stopping the trace. This article introduces how to start, stop, and cancel the autologger as well as export the autologger registry keys.

Introducing EcoQoS

April 21, 2021 Apr 21, 2021 04/21/21

Raymond Li

EcoQoS is a new Quality of Service (QoS) level introduced to Windows that developers can now opt-in to run their work efficiently, leading to better energy efficiency/increased battery life, reduced fan noise and power/thermal throttling.