I’m writing about diagnosing performance problems at the moment and this blog starts the process off for me.  XPerf is an amazing tool that was internal to Microsoft only.  You can now use this yourself!!  One quick update, have a look at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/perftools.mspx for an update to just the xperf tools and you don’t need to download the rest of the SDK either :-).

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...)

This is the first article in the xperf series, the next one is
Xperf Tools Landing Page and Update

The xperf tools have long been an internal tool used by our team, and widely throughout Windows, for system-wide performance analysis.  Xperf got its start many years ago as a set of command-line tools that produce reports based off the ETW instrumentation in the kernel[1]. Many other components and applications in Windows are instrumented with ETW and xperf can enable these events, dump them, and analyze them.

Xperf is an important tool for anyone doing system performance work on Windows because it's specifically designed to give you a complete system-wide view of performance over long periods of time (10's of seconds, to minutes)[2].  It's also the only tool that knows how to fully process all the events from the kernel and correlate them into something that makes sense.

For example, here is a detail graph of all the disk I/O to the system drive on my laptop for opening this post, editing it a bit, and then closing Live Writer. 

Pigs Can Fly : Xperf, a new tool in the Windows SDK

Enjoy,

David