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UIforETW

C++2015–2023

google / UIforETW · Archived

UIforETW

User interface for recording and managing ETW traces

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7Distinct people

8Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

1.7KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

User interface for recording and managing ETW traces

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year8 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-08-27 16:32:27 UTC to 2023-09-24 13:47:11 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2015	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2016	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

8 sources

tjalfi·Sep 24, 2023

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

In Platform that enables Windows driver development in Rust

brucedawson·Jan 31, 2021

powercfg will indeed report on what programs have raised the timer interrupt frequency. However powercfg (and clockres) both just report on the state at a moment in time. Many programs repeatedly raise and then restore the timer interrupt frequency and powercfg utterly fails to understand this. And yet, powercfg is the best that Microsoft has supplied. I eventually decided to write a better alternative. The batch file below (requires Python and Windows Performance Toolkit to be installed) will report on all timer interrupt changes by all processes over the time period recorded: https://github.com/google/UIforETW/blob/main/bin/trace_timer...

In Windows Timer Resolution: The Great Rule Change (2020)

TeMPOraL·Nov 2, 2020

Seconding the post. The post focuses on strace & friends in the Linux/Mac world; for Windows, a powerful tool to look into is Event Tracing for Windows, which lets you trace events, syscalls and performance counters for everything that's running. I.e. a global trace of all (or at least most) processes. Two main tools to look into are xperf, the cmdline tool for configuring and running trace sessions, and Windows Performance Analyzer, a GUI app for exploring recorded traces (additionally, there's Windows Performance Recorder, which seems to be an official GUI for xperf, but I haven't used it myself yet). This is essentially a superpower that's even less known than strace is by Linux devs. I've only learned the basics quite recently, and already used it to debug two hairy issues in few hours, that have already taken a man-month worth of tim

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e and would likely take another one. Being able to explore the recordings of the process tree evolution, see all file IO operations, their times and targets and relation to everything else happening in the system, all in both visual and tabular form - it gives you a perspective you otherwise can't get. (An unfortunate side effect is that the tough bugs, like multiprocess race conditions or silent crashes, all seem to be directed my way nowadays.) Unfortunately, xperf and WPA don't come pre-installed in most Windows distributions; the fastest way to get them is through UIforETW[0] - Google's UI for xperf that can automatically locate and install the correct version of Windows Performance Toolkit[1]. Bruce Dawson (of Google Chrome fame) wrote a lot about advanced usage of this tooling, see: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/. -- [0] - https://github.com/google/UIforETW/releases - fetch the newest .zip package with binaries. [1] - Alternative approach, if you need xperf on a computer with no Internet access (happened to me the other day with a customer's VM), you need to download the Windows SDK ISO (e.g. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/wind...), mount it, and grab the Windows Performance Toolkit installer from the mounted image.

In Extreme Debugging

albertzeyer·Apr 18, 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?

In What Outranks Thread Priority?

albertzeyer·Jul 10, 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. --- 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."

In 24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse

Cylons·Feb 28, 2017

Google also has a similar tool for recording and managing ETW traces: https://github.com/google/UIforETW

In Show HN: Wtrace – A command line tracing tool for Windows, based on ETW

rusanu·Sep 19, 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/

In PerfView Is Now Open Source on GitHub

bentcorner·Aug 27, 2015

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

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46+ will let you see ETW events: https://github.com/google/UIforETW)

In Ad Blocking Extensions Tested for Performance