Visualizing Concurrency: VS 2010 Beta 2 - Parallel Performance Profiling Advancements
- Posted: Oct 19, 2009 at 10:21 AM
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In Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, you were introduced to new analysis and profiling capabilities (Parallel Profiling and Performance Tools) designed to make concurrency understandable and, ultimately, debuggable. Today, with the release of
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, we introduce an updated and significantly more capable concurrency visualization and profiling tool which is available with other profiling features in Visual Studio 2010 Premium and Ultimate. What does it do, exactly? How does
it work?
What's new?
Here, Architect Hazim Shafi, Dev Lead Sasha Dadiomov and PM Bill Colburn tell us all about the Concurrency Visualizer Profiling Tool, including a demo. So, fire up Beta 2, spin up some threads and visualize concurrency. You should profile an already-existing
application that employs concurrency and, perhaps for the first time, get to see what your concurrent code is
actually doing at run time.
Parallel visualization tools team blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/visualizeparallel/
The parallel computing dev center:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/concurrency/default.aspx
Hazim's blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/hshafi/default.aspx
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Witch edition do I need to get access to this?
This is available in Premium and up.
C
What's "Premium?" Is that the equivalent of VS 2008 Pro?
Zian,
See http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010/default.mspx#compare
What version of Windows does this feature require?
On my Server 2003 R2, it says "Requires infrastructure not available on this version of Windows"
Looks like you need a 6+ kernel... http://blogs.msdn.com/hshafi/archive/2009/10/17/vs2010-beta-2-parallel-performance-tool-improvements.aspx#comments
Hi, sorry, but this is the least informative webcast I've seen on "going deep" so far, and I watched quite a few. And it's really surprising since you have 3 developers in the room with the camera and they keep talking marketing...
First off, all this functionality existed for years in Intel Thread Profiler for native applications. Additionally Thread Profiler is displaying transitions (transition from thread1 to thread2 is when thread1 leaves a critical section and thread2 acquires access to it by acquiring the synchronization primitive). From what I understood VS 2010 shows you that the thread was idle/waiting on a sync primitive, but it does not show you which thread needed to release the mutex, so the current one can advance. Another feature, or whole analysis engine is a Critical Path analysis. Which, as I understood it, is also missing from VS 2010 profiler.
From the "going deep" host I was expecting questions like:
Story about helping codec people was a lot of fun! I might be missing something, but it sounded like codec developers could not just figure out to actually time their "encode" and "decode" functions running on a stream/image loaded in memory, then take the inverse and guess the only reasonable explanation for the difference between 90 and 24 FPS. But rather decided to substitute thinking with a GUI tool. Cool
Wow. Thanks for the detailed feedback.
This was an introductory piece, to be fair.
C
Great! Looking forward to hearing more about the Profiler, it really did look like a good starting point. I do realize that half of my questions can be answered with "well, this is the ETW limitation/purpose", but still I was wondering if there's a plan to implement EBS or TBS to provide answers to some more complex questions that arise during performance analysis. Support for TPL and PPL is something I'd very much like to see implemented.
First, let me say that I will follow up with a more detailed walkthrough of the product asap, so keep an eye out for it. Let me address some of your questions:
1. Profiling Overhead: This is of course application dependent and also platform dependent. For CPU-intensive phases of your application the overhead is negligible. Because tracing involves I/O, it can interfere with your I/O intensive applications. On some platforms, collecting callstacks is more expensive (e.g., x64 vs. x86). That's due to the calling conventions that are being used and the information necessary to walk the stack. I don't know of any profiling tool with zero impact, but this has thus far not been a source of feedback from customers. Do you have data to the contrary?
2. We actually sample on both context switches and at regular time intervals (1ms). So, we provide you with data about why threads blocked and where as well as data about what threads are doing when they're executing. You can get at the sample profile data by clicking on the "Execution" legend entry or by clicking on the execution segments in the time line. When you do the latter, we show you the sample callstack and give you a visual hint to where that sample was taken. Does this help?
3. We do have some support for PLINQ, TPL, and PPL. We show markers for PLINQ queries and some PPL and TPL parallel constructs that allow users to identify the region when they are executing so you can focus your tuning on them. Try it out! For PPL, you have to opt into this feature by calling the Concurrency::EnableTracing()/DisableTracing() methods.
4. I had a hard time parsing your comment about the active legend and the checkbox. Can you elaborate more? If this is a usability related question, I am very well aware of some of the warts in the product. We spent a huge amount of time improving the tool from that perspective. Look at our CTP, Beta 1, and Beta 2 bits and you'll agree that we've come a long way. We've also made significant investments in usability studies and worked with designers. We've learned a lot during this process and hope that we can avoid some of the pitfalls in future releases.
For more information about the tool, please visit my blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/hshafi. You might find some useful information there. I also have a detailed article in MSDN magazine at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee336027.aspx.
Finally, Intel's Thread Profiler is very different from our tool in both methodology and diagnostic information provided in addition to our tool being fully integrated with the development experience. I don't want to get into a competitive analysis here, so choose what you find useful for your needs.
Cheers,
-Hazim
Hi, thanks so much for all the info and especially the link to the paper on MSDN, this is exactly the level of details I was looking for. Had a couple of follow up questions after I read it.
Hi apegushi,
Thanks for your feedback; we always appreciate it!
-James
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