Windows Performance Analyzer
System Activity
Windows Performance displays traces of system activity in a graphical format.
WPA provided in the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK).
Download the software package, including scripts and documentation for modern standby analysis.
Graphical Format
Watch this video to learn how to use the “Platform Idle State” graph and the “Device D State“
graph to track hardware devices that cause the hardware platform to spend,
too little time on the DRIPS state.
Standby Analysis
The most obvious benefit of using a modern standby PC is that it can at once recover from sleep.
From pressing the power button to turning on the monitor,
modern standby recovery performance is usually less than one second.
To obtain such high performance, an engineering design needed in Windows,
third-party drivers and system firmware.
Test Complete can check various metrics of Windows applications and computers during the test execution (see Monitoring Tested Application Performance – Basic Concepts).
Test Complete gathers counter data via special measurement infrastructure that embedded into the Microsoft Windows operating system and accessed through the Performance Data Helper (PDH) part.
This part simplifies collecting data for real-time monitoring of one thousand performance counters. Besides that, PDH is the basis for the Windows Performance Monitor application.
Thus, all counters that are available to the Windows Performance Monitor application are also available to an external application that uses the PDH API (in our case, to Test Complete).
So, there are about a thousand counters available to Windows Performance Monitor.
software products (for example, the .NET Framework or ASP.NET Framework) may also introduce their own subsets of counters.
You can find counter descriptions in the Add Counter wizard that you use to create performance counters:
Modern Standby Diagnostics
Performance Toolkit
WPA trace
Power Management
The graphics generated from the Modern Standby WPA profile are critical for seeing,
the behaviour of the system in Modern Standby and finding problems.
Two commonly used WPA diagrams are the “Platform Idle State” diagram and
the DRIPS diagram. The “Platform Idle State” diagram shows the time
the platform spends in various platform idle states, and
the DRIPS diagram shows the activity levels of software and hardware components.
Each graph has a table view that shows the original data used to construct the graph.
You can configure the view using the buttons found in the upper right corner of
the graphics window. The default view is only graphics.
The following paragraphs explain how to change
the default view to obtain information about the behaviour of Modern Standby.
Idle State Graph
The platform idle state diagram shows the residence time in the idle state of the platform plotted against time.
On different platforms, digital states may correspond to different system-on-chip (SoC) states.
Please contact the SoC vendor for the specific mapping of their hardware.
This section only covers the lowest power platform state,
as the time spent in this state is critical to modern standby battery life.
The most important in the idle state of the platform is the deepest state DRIPS.
The DRIPS state corresponds to the lowest power consumption state of
the SoC during modern standby.
Each SoC defines its own DRIPS state and corresponding state index
Each SoC defines its own DRIPS state and corresponding state index.
The percentage of time spent in DRIPS state (DRIPS percentage) is an important indicator of modern,
standby because it is directly proportional to battery life. If the DRIPS percentage is higher,
(over 90%), the battery life will be longer than the lower DRIPS percentage,
(for example, less than 80%).
To get the DRIPS percentage, open the table view and drag the %Duration column to filter the State.
Then, this column will show the percentage of time the system has been in each state.
DRIPS Graph
The DRIPS diagram shows the components that are active during the tracking,
including activators, devices, and processes. Use this graph to figure out the components,
that have been active for the longest time and prevent the system from entering DRIPS.
The activator is a part that obtains references and performs tasks in Modern Standby.
They deal with value-added, explicitly allowed software activities that can run during sleep.
Ideally, they should be active only for short pulses, and the DRIPS graph can used to name,
the most active activator during a modern standby session.
This information is important because certain activators may save references for a long time,
which prevents the system from entering DRIPS?
All the components shown in the image above (except device and CPU activity) are activators.
For example, the above figure shows BI, WNS, NCSI and image download managers as activators.
To name the most active activator, open the table view and look at the “Percentage of Time for Reason”
column, which shows the percentage of time that the activator was active during,
the “Modern Standby” session. For example, the following screenshot shows that
BI is the activator with the highest activation rate, accounting for 49.71%.
Like the system idle state, the device has a low power consumption state from D0 to D3.
The low power consumption state of a device usually standardized by device category.
The SoC manufacturer defines the low power consumption state of the SoC itself.
The low power consumption state of SoC peripherals is usually standardized in all systems.
Network performance counters. This section introduces the most important counters associated with network interfaces, network segments, and TCP/IP components.
