XPerf Articles
Here is a chronological list of the my posts about the xperf tools. If you are new to the tools, or simply want to find a specific article, this is a good place to start. I've listed each article's title and first paragraph. The title is the link to the post.
Xperf, a new tool in the Windows SDK
The SDK team just shipped the latest version of the Windows SDK which supports Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1. The SDK now includes an important new tool; the Windows Performance Tool Kit from the Windows performance team (we call them the xperf tools for short...)
Xperf Tools Landing Page and Update
The WHDC folks now have web page setup for the Windows Performance Toolkit (aka the 'xperf tools'). The page includes downloads for updates to the versions that ship in the SDK. In the near future, this page will include pointers to updated documentation, and discussion forums.
Using Xperf to take a Trace (updated)
Lets get to it! Here is how to take a basic trace then look at CPU and disk utilization. Its really simple, just three commands to turn on tracing, turn it off, and then view the trace.
Xperf support for XP
"Do the xperf tools support XP or Windows Server 2003?" is a frequently ask question. The answer is no mostly, and yes for a few things.
Using the Windows Sample Profiler with Xperf
Using the xperf tools, ETW, and the kernel sample profile interrupt all together provides a very effective and easy to use sample profiler for the analysis of both application and system wide performance. At each sample interrupt, the ETW sub-system captures the instruction pointer and the stack. This data is lazily and efficiently logged to an ETL file. Once the data is saved, it can be analyzed with Performance Analyzer.
So just what is in a trace? Using the xperf trace dumper
There is a lot of information in a typical kernel trace. While the Performance Analyzer tool is quite powerful and makes it easy to view a trace graphically, sometimes you just need to see what is in the trace directly. Xperf makes this easy.
Bruce Dawson is a performance analyst on the client performance team. He has written this guest post on enabling stack walking using xperf for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows systems (Vista and Win7).