Profile Explorer is a tool for viewing CPU profiling traces collected through the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) infrastructure on machines with x64 and ARM64 CPUs. Its focus is on presenting the slowest parts of the profiled application through an easy-to-use but detailed UI consisting of several views, such as a hot function list, flame graph, call tree, timeline, assembly code view, and source file view.
The application can be viewed as a companion to Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA), offering some unique features based on the binary analysis it performs and the IDE-like UI, such as easy navigation through disassembly, improved mapping to source lines, displaying the function control-flow graph, viewing of multiple functions at the same time, marking, searching, filtering and much more.
One of the app's key advantages is its performance. It loads traces fast and offers near-instant UI interaction, even for very large traces (over 10 GB ETL files). Most profile processing steps and algorithms are multi-threaded and don't block the UI.
Installers for the latest version:
Use the ARM64 installer if you have a machine with an ARM64 CPU, since it includes a native build of the app (no emulation), otherwise use the x64 installer. Note that the x64 app can open traces taken on ARM64 machines and vice versa.
The app also has a built-in auto-update feature that will notify you when a new version is released and offer to download and install it.
The installers for previous versions can be downloaded from the Releases page.
The documentation pages are available here:
The app also has a built-in Help panel that can display the same documentation.
Most views have a question mark icon in the upper-right corner that opens the Help panel on the view's documentation page.
To build the application and its external dependencies, ensure the following build tools are installed on a Windows 11 machine:
- recent Visual Studio 2022 with the following workflows:
- .NET desktop development
- Desktop development with C++
- C++ ARM64/ARM64EC build tools (Latest) - for native ARM64 builds
- .NET 8.0 SDK (should be installed by Visual Studio 2022 already)
From a an admin command-line window, run:
build.cmd [debug|release]for an x64 build.build-arm64.cmd [debug|release]for a native ARM64 build.
The debug or release build mode is used for the main project; external dependencies are always built in release mode. The admin mode for the command-line is required to register msdia140.dll using regsvr32; it needs to be done once on a machine.
The build script will update the git submodules, build the main project and external dependencies, and then copy the built dependencies and other resources to the output directory.
The output directory with ProfileExplorer.exe will be found at:
src\ProfileExplorerUI\bin\[Debug|Release]\net8.0-windows.
After the initial build, open the solution file src\ProfileExplorer.sln and use the ProfileExplorerUI project as the build and startup target.
To publish the application and create an installer, from a command-line window run:
installer\x64\prepare.cmdfor an x64 build.installer\arm64\prepare.cmdfor a native arm64 build.
This will build the main project as a self-contained application, build the external dependencies, and create the installer executable, with build output files found at:
installer\[x64|arm64]\outinstaller\[x64|arm64]\profile_explorer_installer_VERSION.exe
Currently InnoSetup is used to create the installer and it must be already installed on the machine and iscc.exe found on PATH.
Below is a high-level overview of the main parts of the application.
| Location | Description |
|---|---|
| src/ProfileExplorerUI | The main project and application UI, implemented using WPF. |
| src/ProfileExplorerCore | The UI-independent part that defines the intermediate representation (IR), parsing functions, Graphviz and Tree Sitter support, various data structures, algorithms and utilities. |
| src/ProfileExplorerUITests | Unit tests for the ProfileExplorerUI project. |
| src/ProfileExplorerCoreTests | Unit tests for the ProfileExplorerCore project. |
| src/ManagedProfiler | .NET JIT profiler extension for capturing JIT output assembly code. |
| src/PDBViewer | A small utility displaying the contents of PDB debug info files, implemented using WinForms. |
| src/VSExtension | A Visual Studio extension that connects to the application. Not used for profiling functionality. |
| src/GrpcLib | Defines the GRPC protobuf format used by the Visual Studio extension to communicate with the application. Not used for profiling functionality. |
The following projects are build from source, as either x64 or native arm64 binaries.
| Location | Description |
|---|---|
| src/external/capstone | Capstone disassembly framework, submodule. |
| src/external/graphviz | Graphviz graph visualization tools, submodule. |
| src/external/tree-sitter | Tree-sitter parser generator, with support for C/C++, C# and Rust, submodules. |
| src/external/TreeListView | TreeListView, WPF tree list view control. |
- Profiling UI compoments are independent from the profiling trace source.
- Loading the trace produces a set of profile samples and associated call stacks – building blocks for the call tree, flame graph, function list, assembly view.
- Debuging info (PDB) files are downloaded in parallel, source line info read on-demand per function.
- Binary disassembly done on-demand per function.
- Initial trace processing and subsequent filtering is multi-threaded.
- UI updates are mostly async and multi-threaded.
- Opening binaries without a profiling trace is supported.
The application started as a tool for helping compiler developers interact with and better understand a compiler's intermediate representation (IR). After adding simple support for viewing profile traces, it gradually gained more profiling features and primarily became a profile viewer.
The tool's initial focus on compilers has led to some distinctive features, such as the ability to parse assembly code into an internal IR. This enables an interactive view of assembly code and the visualization of control-flow graphs, for example.
profiler-ui.mp4
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This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.
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