Trace naming is important in order to know when I recorded a trace and why.I recommend recording important conclusions in the trace information with call stacks, process and thread IDs, and time ranges. Trace information can also be prepopulated with important details – for Chrome developers I prepopulate it with a list of Chrome process IDs by type. Trace information is stored in a text file with the same base-name as the trace, and is automatically loaded and stored as you navigate through traces. It means that I can easily refresh my memory as to why I recorded a trace and what I found in it. It’s a tiny detail, but I find it invaluable. Trace information is an edit field that lets me record notes about what I have found in a trace.This feature is effectively missing from wprui, which is bizarre. This only works on Windows 8 and above, but Windows 10 is a free upgrade. ETW trace compression is on by default in UIforETW and it makes traces 5-10x smaller.Therefore I think that the trace management features of UIforETW are crucial. If I’m not careful then my notes on what I found in a particular trace will end up scattered through dozens of e-mails, google docs, and hangouts discussions. The investigative reporting posts that I do almost always require one or more ETW traces, and there are many more that I record while optimizing Chrome, or whatever I happen to be doing for a living. The announcement on the Google open source blog is at.It probably works, but who knows? Caveat luddite, and really, caveat anyone using UIforETW – no warranties and all that. Note that UIforETW has not been tested on 32-bit Windows. I also like to use the trace information area to record notes about my analysis. See the trace list context menu for more options. You can rename the just-saved trace (F2) to remind you why you recorded it, then double-click (or type Ctrl E) it to launch Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA). Tracing to circular buffers will continue. Go off and use your computer and the next time something happens that you want to investigate just type Ctrl Win C to save the buffers to disk. By default this will trace to circular buffers in memory, so you can leave this running 24×7, with minimal impact on your computer’s performance. Once you’ve run UIforETW click Start Tracing. Pull requests are welcome – just read the CONTRIBUTING file in the main directory. You can also get the UIforETW code from github and build it if you want. It’s designed to be simple enough for non-experts to use, so send your customers to that page. The process of installing UIforETW and recording a trace is documented in Xperf Basics: Recording a Trace (the ultimate easy way). When you run etwpackage\bin\UIforETW.exe it will install the necessary versions of the Windows Performance Toolkit (and unlike VS 2015 it knows which versions work on Windows 7). The simplest way to get started is to download etwpackage.zip from the UIforETW releases page on github. A couple of combo boxes, a list of traces, and a text box for entering notes about traces. A few check boxes to control tracing options. It has a few buttons to start/stop tracing and record traces. Using UIforETW is pretty straightforward. For more information on UIforETW and ETW/xperf tracing see ETW Central. This post has been updated several times to document the many great new features that have been added since the original release. If you just want to record ETW traces then go to this page for some relatively simple instructions. Download it, build it, hack on it, fork it, or contribute. I’m pleased to announce that UIforETW has been released on github. This is a tool that records ETW traces, works around ETW performance bugs, allows configuration of trace recording options, works as a trace management UI, and more. I finally got annoyed enough by this situation to create UIforETW. The fallback plan is to use carefully crafted batch files to record ETW traces. Microsoft’s wprui.exe showed some potential, but is ultimately missing some features and often gets tripped up by ETW performance bugs. But recording ETW traces has always been tricky. Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) aka xperf is an amazing tool for investigating the performance of Windows machines – I’ve blogged about it many times and it’s helped me find some amazing issues.
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