Windows Performance Tools Kit v.4.1.1
Thursday, 24 April 2008 by Michel Roth
An easily overlooked tool that can give you an deep insight into the different factor that make up the performance of your server of workstation: the Windows Performance Tools Kit. Microsoft recently has updated the Windows Performance Tools Kit to support Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. It's a pretty intense set of tool but it will give you information that most other tools don't. The Windows Performance Tools (WPT) Kit contains performance analysis tools that are new to the Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. The WPT Kit is useful to a broad audience, including system builders, hardware manufacturers, driver developers, and general application developers. These tools are designed for measuring and analyzing system and application performance on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and later.

The tools currently include an xperf trace capture tool, an xperfview visualization tool (also known as Performance Analyzer), and an xbootmgr boot trace capture tool. The tools are designed for the analysis of a wide range of performance problems including application start times, boot issues, deferred procedure calls and interrupt activity (DPCs and ISRs), system responsiveness issues, application resource usage, and interrupt storms. The MSIs containing these tools are available in the SDK bin directory (one per architecture).

The tools are built on top of the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) infrastructure. ETW enables Windows and applications to efficiently generate events. Events can be enabled and disabled at any time without requiring system or process restarts. ETW collects requested kernel events and saves them to one or more files that are referred to as "trace files" or "traces."

These kernel events provide extensive details about the operation of the system. Some of the most important and useful kernel events that are available for capture and analysis are context switches, interrupts, DPCs, process and thread creation and destruction, disk I/Os, hard faults, processor P-state transitions, registry operations, and many others.

Al though the team that made this tool must be extremely knowlegdeable in terms of Windows, they must have missed a marketing session or two ;-)

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Windows Performance Tools Kit v.4.1.1.


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