In this lab, you will run some ad-hoc performane queries on a system using etrace. Before you begin, you will need to download or clone the etrace repository, and compile it using Visual Studio 2015 or later.
Open an elevated command prompt and navigate to the output directory where you compiled etrace.
Run the following command to monitor process start events:
etrace --kernel Process --event Process/Start
Run one or two processes and note them showing up in the trace. Hit Ctrl+C to stop recording at any time.
Next, run the following command to monitor GC allocation events:
etrace --clr GC --event GC/AllocationTick
Run Visual Studio or open a solution in an existing Visual Studio instance to see the GC events occur in real-time. You can also experiment with some additional command-line options (run etrace --help to see a full list), for example to display only certain fields from each event, or to filter the output only to events that have a particular property (e.g., ImageFileName=notepad).
Use etrace to answer the following questions about the live system and/or about one of the .etl files you recorded for the previous labs:
- Which files are being opened?
- Which DLLs are being loaded into the devenv process as you open a new solution in Visual Studio?
- Which ASP.NET requests are being handled by IIS? (You will need a recording of an IIS process with ASP.NET, or a live ASP.NET application running on the system. The events you care about belong to the AspNet provider.)
- Which .NET object types are being allocated often by WPA when you open a trace recording? (WPA is a managed application.)
- How many thread creation events occurred during a particular interval (on the live system or in an .etl file)?
You can use
etrace --helpto review the general command-line options. Most of the events you will need are kernel events or CLR events, which you can list usingetrace --list CLRandetrace --list Kernel.