Using the Windows Sample Profiler with Xperf

XPerf - Windows Performance Toolkit

All Your Base Are Belong To Us — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 21:40:57 GMT

Event Tracing for Windows has been with us since Windows 2000. It is an infrastructure for raising events

Windows Performance Tools Kit

Notes from a dark corner — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:41:20 GMT

If you like delving into the depths of how a Windows system is performing (or not performing) then a

re: Using the Windows Sample Profiler with Xperf

SloNN — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 15:47:38 GMT

We are developing our application for XP and W2k3 OS'es mainly, could you write about xperf features available on that OS'es, please?

re: Using the Windows Sample Profiler with Xperf

SloNN — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 15:41:02 GMT

Bad luck. :(

I've hoped that I found a solution for our devision to resolve high CPU issues.

Anyway thanks for the answer!

re: Using the Windows Sample Profiler with Xperf

rgr — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 22:02:30 GMT

Hi SloNN,

My appologies - I should have made this clear in my post. The ability to take a stack trace is only avabile on Vista and Windows Server 2008. The XP kernel doesn't support this. This is mostly likey the root of the issue you are seeing. I've updated my posts to reflect this.

RGR

Problems with stack

SloNN — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 18:09:26 GMT

I have followed your advise about xperf on WinXP. Traces were captured with profile info and merged on XP machine with "xperf -d" command line. Then I moved on my Vista computer and loaded the traces in xperf. Everything works perfectly except one thing. I cannot get correct profiling information.

I have loaded all our company symbols with private information, all microsoft symbols from ms store, checked Load Symbols check, then choosed "Summary table" menu item. But there are "?" signs everythere in Stack column. If I expand all "+" signs in the stack column I see correct information in Function column, but menu items "Callers->Innermost, outermost; Callees->Innermost,outermost" are disabled. I was not able to find any way to resolve this problem.

I tried to execute "stack" action in console mode, but result file was empty (no meaningful info, just some headers). I experimented with different command line parameters, but results were the same. I've double rechecked "Troubleshooting symbol decoding" section, but results were the same.

And I noted that profiling info is incorrect. I tried to resolve 100% CPU usage in our application. I attached to process with Process Explorer, found malfunctioning thread and looked at its stacks. Information shown in xperf was invalid, it shows 99% weight in kernel32, but really it was endless cycle in our user code. May be it is result of the symbols problem.

BTW I captured the same traces on Vista machine, opened them there and see correct Stacks data with all the menu items "Callers,Callers" enabled.