What does HackerNews think of UIforETW?

User interface for recording and managing ETW traces

Language: C++

Platform that enables Windows driver development in Rust | Sep 2023
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You can use UI4ETW[0] to capture an event trace when the mouse freezes. You may need to install the Windows SDK or Visual Studio to interpret the results, though.

[0] https://github.com/google/UIforETW
What Outranks Thread Priority? | Apr 2020
There is a whole series of very interesting (even exciting) analyses by this author (randomascii, Bruce Dawson). Most of them are using his own tool UIforETW (https://github.com/google/UIforETW/).

I wonder, what alternative tool would you use on Mac? I guess Xcode Instruments in some variant? And this is based on DTrace, right? Would that give you all the same possibilities and traces as UIforETW?

And what alternative tool would you use on Linux? perf? eBPF? That would give you the same information as UIforETW? And what GUI would be similar to UIforETW or Xcode instruments?

24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse | Jul 2017
I was wondering what ETW is, and found in one of his other posts: ETW (Event Tracing for Windows).

He seems to be one of the main contributors of https://github.com/google/UIforETW

Seems to be quite useful.

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About the post: tl;dr: NtGdiCloseProcess has a system-wide global lock which is used quite often e.g. during a build of Chrome which spawns a lot of processes. This problem seems to be introduced between Windows 7 and Windows 10.

I thought that there would be a solution or a fix but it seems this is not yet fixed. "This problem has been reported to Microsoft and they are investigating."

Show HN: Wtrace – A command line tracing tool for Windows, based on ETW | Feb 2017
Google also has a similar tool for recording and managing ETW traces: https://github.com/google/UIforETW
PerfView Is Now Open Source on GitHub | Sep 2016
On the topic of ETW is worth mentioning UIforETW [0] and in general Bruce Dawson's blog [1].

[0] https://github.com/google/UIforETW

[1] https://randomascii.wordpress.com/

Ad Blocking Extensions Tested for Performance | Aug 2015
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This is exactly what ETW was designed to help you measure.

Running WPRUI with first level triage will measure CPU along with a bunch of other stuff. Enabling ReferenceSet under memory Resource Analysis will measure memory usage.

Chrome has an ETW provider, I poked around a bit and couldn't find any for FF (it looks like they register one for the JS engine?)

I'm not familiar with how to solve the "page loaded enough but not done" problem, but IMO if you measure end-to-end times it's probably a close-enough proxy. Maybe measure several times and report on those statistics.

(Edit: Taking a trace with/without the adblocker enabled should allow you to exactly count # of sampled cycles spent in the adblocker - easy to compare in WPA, as long as there are events emitted indicating page load start/stop).

(Edit2: Using UIforETW along with Chrome 46+ will let you see ETW events:

https://github.com/google/UIforETW)