When something feels off with our PCs, most of us go straight for the usual suspects. You open Task Manager, glance at the CPU and memory graphs, maybe fire up HWiNFO or MSI Afterburner, and start guessing from there. But what if the culprit isn’t obvious?
There’s a far more powerful tool built right into Windows’ ecosystem that most people have never heard of: Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA). It’s one of Microsoft’s most underrated utilities, and is incredibly deep. If you want to better understand what might be ailing your PC, this is the tool to do just that.
What is Windows Performance Analyzer?
WPA is a very robust troubleshooting tool
WPA is part of the Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT), which itself lives inside the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK). It’s the same suite of tools Microsoft engineers use internally to diagnose performance problems on Windows, and the data it provides goes way beyond what you’ll get from standard utilities.
Unlike Task Manager or Resource Monitor, WPA doesn’t show you live metrics. It gives you a recorded timeline of virtually everything that has happened on your system during a specific window of time. It reads trace files created by the Windows Performance Recorder, which is also included in the ADK. To install both of these, download and install the ADK, and select both the Performance Recorder and the Performance Analyzer. Once installed, you can record a trace file (.etl) with the Recorder, and open it in the Analyzer to view the traces you're looking for. Once recorded, those traces can be broken down to show what threads were running, what drivers were waiting, and even how long each frame took to render on your GPU.
Why you should add it to your toolkit
It's a lot of information, but it's worth it
For enthusiasts and power users, WPA is a goldmine. It can answer questions that simpler tools can’t, and can expose other issues you weren't aware of. You can diagnose microstuttering and frame drop, find and squash storage bottlenecks, fix DPC latency, audio issues, and even diagnose slow boot times. WPR can be run from boot, so you know exactly why your PC takes so long to get into Windows. This is the same sort of tool that engineers use to diagnose performance issues.
It isn't all smooth sailing, though. After installing, I had some issues with opening traces that had been recorded with "Verbose" mode turned on. It seems there's a fix for this in the Windows Insider version of the ADK, but I wasn't able to get a download. I was able to view traces that were recorded with the detail level set to "Light", however. Even with that, the level of detail in the data supplied by WPA is quite something.
WPA also isn't a total replacement for other diagnostic and performance utilities. LatencyMon, MSI Afterburner, and HWiNFO all still have merit on your PC, they're all just different tools in your toolbox.
How to read what you're looking at in WPA
It's a bit overwhelming
WPA throws a ton of data at you, and at first, it can be difficult to parse through it all. If you're attempting to diagnose a specific issue, it can help to set a marker during the recording process, so you know where to look for it once you view the recording later. The default keybind for this is Ctrl+Alt+Win+X, and can be done anytime during trace capture. You can also select precisely what data you want to record beforehand.
I'll admit that I'm still finding my way around WPA myself, but I have found that WPA's zoom and filter tools let you pinpoint events down to the microsecond. You can even overlay graphs to see how CPU usage correlates with disk operation, or GPU usage.
For example, if a misbehaving driver is flooding your CPU with interrupts, you can see that in a trace with WPA. Spikes in "Interrupt Service Routines" will be a huge red flag. A simple driver update, depending on which device it is, should fix that issue.
I would try to keep your traces relatively short, as they can balloon in size if you record for multiple minutes. The short traces I recorded for the purposes of this article took up over 12 GB of space, and that's with the detail level set to Light, and only lasting a couple of minutes at the most.
WPA is a must have if you're frequently diagnosing issues on any PC
The Windows Performance Analyzer is one of the most powerful diagnostic tools ever shipped with Windows, but almost no one uses it. It can visualize exactly what your system was doing, down to the microsecond, and show you why your performance might not be matching expectations. If you’ve ever wiped your drive or reinstalled Windows out of frustration, WPA might already have an answer, sitting there in plain sight.