1. Demystifying Visual Studio
2012 Performance Tools
Martin Kulov | kulov.net
www.devreach.com

2. You cannot manage,
What you do not measure
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3. You cannot Improve,
What you do not measure
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4. Trace Analysis
Our code
CLR COM WinRT
Win32 API
Operating System
HDD RAM CPU LAN CPU
Counters
www.devreach.com

5. CPU Counters
• Hardware events – portable and platform
– Instructions Retired
– Non Halted Cycles
– ITLB Misses
– Branches Retired
– Mis-predicted Branches
– L2 Cache Read Misses
– L2 Cache Read References
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6. Trace Analysis
Our code
CLR COM WinRT
Windows
Win32 API Perf
Counters
Operating System
HDD RAM CPU LAN CPU
Counters
www.devreach.com

7. Windows Performance Counters
• They are …counters
• Min interval – 1sec
• Apps and kernel send Increment signals
• Accessed by Windows API
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8. Perf Counters Demo
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9. Trace Analysis
Our code
CLR COM WinRT
Windows
Event
Win32 API Perf
Tracing
Counters
for Operating System
Windows
HDD RAM CPU LAN CPU
Counters
www.devreach.com

10. Event Tracing for Windows
• General purpose, high speed tracing
• Buffering and logging in kernel
• Faster than printf
– 20,000 events per second while only using 5% CPU load on a P3 500MHz!
• Provider, Consumer, Controller model
• Over 700 providers in Win7, ~900 in Win8!
• Aggregates all sources
• Stack walking (on kernel events)
www.devreach.com

11. ETW Kernel Providers
• Hardware Configuration Events
• Disk-level I/O
• File-level I/O
• Image Layouts
• Page Faults
• Network I/O
• Registry I/O
• Process and Thread info
www.devreach.com

12. ETW Application Providers
• Windows Firewall
• WLAN, LAN
• USB, Bluetooth
• IIS, ASP.NET, CLR, HTTP.SYS
• Security
• … many more
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13. ETW Demo
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14. Side note: Symbols
• _NT_SYMBOL_PATH=SRV*c:mss*http://
msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
• Call stack information
• Private managed code fields
• Link to source code repository
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15. Concurrency Visualizer
• Utilization
• Threads
• Cores
• Stack Walking
www.devreach.com

16. Trace Analysis
Profiler
Our code
CLR COM WinRT
Windows
Event
Win32 API Perf
Tracing
Counters
for Operating System
Windows
HDD RAM CPU LAN CPU
Counters
www.devreach.com

17. Profiler
• Instrumentation
• Sampling
• Concurrency
• Stack Walking
www.devreach.com

18. Profiler setup
• There can be only one
• Uses environment variables
– COR_ENABLE_PROFILING
– COR_PROFILER
– COR_XXX…
• Profiler API
www.devreach.com

19. Instrumentation
• Profiler based
• Requires full code recompilation
• Best during development phase
• Complete execution path
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20. Sampling
• Profiler based
• Data collection on sample intervals
• Suitable for long runs
• Call Stack
www.devreach.com

21. Concurrency
• Show resource contention
• Based on Detours
• Microsoft Research project now sold for
$10k
• http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/detours/
• Stack Walking
www.devreach.com

22. Profiling extras
• GC, Allocation
• Tier Interaction
• JavaScript
• Production use
• Licensing
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23. Profiler Demo
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24. Thank you!
@kulov
www.kulov.net
www.linkedin.com/in/kulov
Martin Kulov | kulov.net
www.devreach.com