Tracing Multitheraded Windows applications

Abstract

Performance evaluation is critical in developing computer systems. To evaluate the performance and to study the characteristics of program execution, program tracing and monitoring software have been used widely. However, in the Windows/x86 platform, it is very difficult to build such a software tool, because the Windows system and its many applications are distributed without source code. In addition, the x86 CPU has a complicated instruction set architecture and is difficult to analyze. In this paper, we report a program tracing tool for the Windows NT/x86 platform, which aims at tracing multithreaded Windows applications without source code available. We have applied our tracing system to a number of benchmark programs. Their execution characteristics obtained from out tool are presented.