Attendees

• @Przemyslaw Wirkus

• @Manoj Iyer

• @Lina Iyer

• Alaaeddine Chakroun

• Nader Zouaoui

• Gabriel Chouchane

Other

• We have WPA plugin Wiki page WindowsPerf GUI - WPA plugin design overview which describes milestones we will continue developing.

• @Manoj Iyer: suggested that we should consider adding docs with some pointers regarding:

  • How to position wperf.exe with start /affinity MASK to avoid wperf process to reside on the same core with sampled / counted payload.

  • As above but for VS / VS-extension process (GUI).

• @Przemyslaw Wirkus: With VS-extension development and WPA-plugin we need to consider “combined release” where we create and publish binary release containing:

  • WindowsPerf (wperf + wperf-driver + wperf-lib).

  • VS-extension binary file(s).

  • WPA-plugin binary file(s).

Minutes

• Discuss WPA plugin kick off agenda.

  • We will firstly focus on counting support for WindowsPerf 3.0.0.

  • We will tackle sampling output when we finalize counting and timeline (N x counting).

• WPA mainly for static (not real time) chart / graph GUI.

  • WPA contains many way to filter column / row data from provided data-set.

  • Mainly for plotting.

• WPA plugin allow users to write simple data-set adapters. These can convert any format into WPA readable format.

  • Another option is to generate WPA compatible output that e.g. WPR (Recorder) can produce.

  • We can also read e.g. CSV files or JSON files and load them “via plugin” to WPA GUI for plotting.

• WPA can be used in counting for:

  • Plotting of 1 count instance, with 1..n cores used.

  • Plotting of events and metrics in counting.

  • Plotting of timeline - a list of consecutive (in time) counts. Example command specified by user wperf stat ... -t -i <I> -n <N>.

    • Plotting of timeline would be done by reading a JSON file which contains each counting “occurrence”.

    • We may want to add timestamp to each counting (when started, up to [ms] in order to plot these with proper time scale in WPA (WPA can read e.g. timestamps as X axis).

• Nader suggested that we can also use WPA and present meaningful data from sampling.

  • TBD as we will first focus on WPA counting support.

• Nader suggested that we can prepare workflow in which:

  • User, with vs-extension does counting / sampling and its output can be passed directly to WPA for visualisation / plotting.

  • This is very good idea and will simplify WindowsPerf GUI (vs-extension) - we can avoid plotting code inside extension and delegate to existing tool.

  • Note: WPA is not capable for “real time” plotting, so we can prot in WPA when we finalize timelines. because timelines may be long (>1h) users will not be able to observe timeline progression in WPA.

    • Also, wperf currently do not support “real time” timeline count data output. We generate CSV file when timeline is finished.

• Nader suggested that we should build timeline for WPA GUI plotting with JSON format only, as CSV is not so flexible.

  • We need a JSON format as it’s easier to parse compared to CSV plus it is already used in VS-extension.

  • We want to add few things to counting JSON itself, e.g:

    • Add timestamp (start / stop) or duration of count.

    • No need to add interval (-i command line option) timestamps as these are “void space” between counts. As we know when count start / stop.

    • Add to counting JSON output, when we use metrics with formula (-m <METRIC command line option), metric formula and metric unit to improve WPA plotting.

      • We do not want to call wperf to get this information as WPA is not designed to call other programs. It’s designed to statically load input file.

TODO