Performance Analyzer is a powerful tool that provides detailed views of system behavior. You can view charts of various trace data that record information about CPU usage, Disk I/O, and hard faults. You can zoom in and view specific details more closely.

Performance Analyzer provides many different graphical views of trace data that include the following:

• CPU Sampling
• CPU and disk utilization by process and thread
• Interrupt service routine and deferred procedure call usage
• Hard faults
• Disk I/O detail

The disk I/O detail chart is very useful and provides a graphical view of the I/O patterns to logical disk offset graphed over time. The following figure shows an example of a disk I/O detail chart.

In this chart view, you can see patterns and interesting regions in a trace such as areas of high CPU utilization, disk I/O, or hard faults. You can quickly scroll and zoom to explore large traces

As useful as the charts are, they often do not provide enough detail to find the root causes of a performance or resource utilization issue. With Performance Analyzer’s summary table feature, you can research deep into a system, application, and even component behavior in both user-mode components and kernel-mode components, to determine a root cause of a problem.

The following figure shows a summary table view of disk I/O from a trace.

You can show, hide, or reposition individual columns so that you get an optimum view for your purposes. Additionally, you can move columns to the left of the gold bar so that you can sort data in many different ways.

One of the most powerful features in Performance Analyzer is the ability to visualize stacks. The following figure shows the stacks that are taken for each sample profile event from a trace.

Note  Stack visualization requires no special instrumentation in the code; however, you must have symbols for the binary components that you want to analyze.

The following features of Performance Analyzer tools help diagnose a wide range of system performance problems:

• stack visualization
• symbol decoding
• the ability to take a trace on any Windows system without restarting processes or Windows