Profile Windows Application

Question

I want to profile a generic Win32 application for which I don't have the source code on a high level.

I imagine it working like this:

• I specify which app to profile
• I run a specific action
• the profiler tells me how much CPU was spent in which DLL
• bonus points for I/O waits or contended locks

Is this possible?

Answer 1

There is a "Windows Performance Toolkit" that MS provides for free. It uses Kernel-level eventing and is therefore quite precise, stack traces are supported as well. It will use symbols if they are available.

You can get it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2008/04/03/windows-performance-toolkit-xperf.aspx