Windows Performance Toolkit to Trace the Windows 7 Startup Performance

The Windows Performance Tools contains performance analysis tools that are new to the Windows SDK for windows server 2008 and .Net framework 3.5. The kit is quite useful to a broad audience and are designed for measuring and analyzing system and application performance on Windows platforms, Vista and up. The toolkit analysis a wide range of performance problem happening on your windows system, including application start times, boot issues, system responsiveness issues, resource usage, etc.

The toolkit unfortunately doesn’t come as a single download package. Instead, it’s shipped as part of the Windows SDK. When you install it, you can just select the Performance Toolkit out of all components so only the toolkit gets installed.

The Windows Performance Toolkit contains the analyzer tool suite consisting of the following three tools:

• Xpref.exe to capture traces, post-processes.
• Xperfview.exe to present the trace content in the form of the interactive graphs and summery tables.
• Xbootmgr.exe to automate on/off state transitions and captures traces during the boot.

John Savill’s weekly tips & tricks email newsletter shares an example he put together how to trace the startup performance. Basically, use the xbootmgr command to setup tracing of a windows boot to start.

xbootmgr -trace boot -traceFlags base+drivers+power+cswitch -numRuns 1 -resultPath C:\TEMP

Once you entered this command, the machine will be shut down and rebooted. After you log into the machine again, you will see a screen saying

After the tool is done, go to the folder you specified above and several files will be present: a log file, a .cab file, alone with a very large .etl file that contains all the collected data. You can then view the file using xperfview.exe in a nicer format that you can spot the source that causes the issue.