Download Perfview.exe

[Debora Mccaffery]

PerfViewreleased recently by Microsoft, has the ability to collect Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) data to trace the call flow of processes identifying the frequency with which functions are called. Until now, this tool has only been used internally within Microsoft by developers responsible for ensuring optimal performance with components of the operating system.

In addition to profiling process performance data (something tools like Perfmon, PAL and xperf can't easily do), PerfView also has the ability to analyze process memory heaps to help determine if memory is being used efficiently. It also has a Diff capability that allows you to determine any differences between traces to help spot any regressions. Finally, the tool has a Dump capability to generate a process memory dump.

Installing PerfView

Version 1.0 of the product includes a zip file with just one executable file, perfview.exe, making installation easy. You can copy the file to the various servers that you want to trace and then analyze the data there or on your local workstation. PerfView is supported on Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Collecting Profile Data

PerfView leverages Event Tracing for Windows, which has been built into the operating system since Windows 2000 Server. Only recently have tools such as XPerf and PerfView taken advantage of ETW data for troubleshooting performance problems.

Viewing the Results

Once you have collected data during the time period for the performance issue, you can analyze the ETL file with PerfView. The ETL file will appear in the lefthand pane with the name you provided during the collection dialog or run command. By double-clicking the ETL file, about a dozen individual leaf nodes will appear with names indicating their contents. For example, you will see TraceInfo, Processes, Events, CPU Stacks, etc. as seen in Figure 2. By double-clicking each node, an appropriate viewer will reveal the contents.

As you can see in the example, the function System.DateTime.get_Now() is executing 87% of the time. Therefore, to get the biggest bang for the buck, you would want to focus on optimizing either the number of times this module is called, or optimize the code within the module. While this is a trivial example, the tool can help you to identify misbehaving applications and where they are wasting time.

PerfView is a user-friendly tool that can be used to collect and analyze ETW data for profiling process performance data issues. The tool can quickly reveal the operating system functions that are being executed on behalf of the process, gaining insight to where performance problems may be lurking.

3a8082e126