Symbol loading improvements to PIX Timing Captures

Have you ever opened a Timing Capture only to realize you hadn’t configured your symbol path correctly? The good news is that PIX has long had the ability to process symbols after the fact. The bad news is that you had to close and reopen the capture (after fixing up your symbol path) to trigger PIX to reload the symbols.

A small, but incredibly useful new feature has been added to Timing Captures in the 2107.01 release of PIX on Windows: the ability to reload symbols without having to close and reopen the capture.

If you make changes to your symbol path settings while a Timing Capture is open, use the Reload Symbols menu option on the Manage Symbols menu in the upper left corner of the capture to cause PIX to re-process the symbols.

Another feature of note is the symbol loading progress bar. This progress bar has been in PIX for several releases now, but we’ve recently updated it to make it more prominent and to display information about which stage of the symbol loading process is currently being performed.

If you see <unknown> where you’d expect a function name, and you’ve set your symbol path correctly, it could be that PIX is still processing the symbols. In this case, the function names will be populated when symbol processing finishes. The following figure shows an example of <unknown > function names.