Best Practices for Investigating Performance Problems (Windows CE 5.0)
For an excellent general guideline about analyzing performance problems, see Microsoft Web site.
Investigating a performance problem involves the same general guidelines as testing a debugging of any kind:
- Define clear expectations
- Isolate the problem
- Establish an environment that allows consistent reproduction of the scenario
In the Platform Builder environment, it is also important to make sure that the Platform Builder tools are working with correct information about compilation symbols.
- Make sure that you have specified the correct symbol path for your executables.
- Verify that the timestamp for each .map file in the release directory matches the corresponding executable. If the timestamps do not match, rebuild the executable and then build a new run-time image that supports the profiler you intend to use. For information about building a run-time image that supports the kernel profiler, see Building a Run-Time Image That Supports the Kernel Profiler.
Four Phases of Performance Tuning
The following list shows the four phases of performance tuning in the Platform Builder environment. Repeat these steps until you achieve the goals you set out.
- Collect information
- Analyze the information
- Analyze first with Kernel Profiler to determine which code is running the most.
- Analyze next with CeLog Event Tracking to get more info such as DLL loads, process creation, thread behavior.
- Configure a solution
- Implement one solution at a time
- Make optimizations based on data
- Test the solution
- Check the correctness and performance of the test itself
- Don't guess, measure.
- Make sure that all test results can be reproduced
- Document the changes and results.
See Also
Performance Tools for Networked Media Devices | Debugging and Testing a Networked Media Device
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