Monday, February 15, 2016

MXA: Another specialized Windows Performance Tracing tool

Goodness knows I love a good Windows Performance Tracing exercise.

So imagine my delight when I spotted a new tool for doing just that – and one that is narrowly focused on tracing out audio/video playback issues!

Media eXperience Analyzer (MXA) is a visual performance analysis tool that enables engineers to optimize performance and quality of Media scenarios on Windows devices. MXA enables a broader range of performance engineers to infer meaningful information from a large amount discrete event data by representing events visually and providing powerful filtering capabilities. MXA is utilized to optimize quality, performance, and latency of the following scenarios:

    • Camera capture
    • Miracast & PlayTo
    • Energy efficiency for media
    • Audio & video playback & transcode
    • Real-time communications (Skype & Lync)
MXA is capable of loading traces collected on Windows, Windows Phone, and XBox. MXA assists with identifying delays and bottlenecks in the CPU, GPU, network, and disk and is primarily applied to:
    • Root causing audio and video glitches
    • Improving audio video synchronization
    • Correlating physical domain with software domain
    • Correlating power usage per component with system activity
    • Optimizing latency between Miracast source and sink devices
    • Optimizing devices for full screen video playback and low power audio
    • Verifying critical media threads are enlisted in Multimedia Class Scheduler Service (MMCSS)

How cool is that?!

To get a good understanding of the tool in action, Microsoft’s Channel 9 “Defrag Tools” has been running a series of sessions on it.

If you have worked with the Windows Performance Analysis Toolkit the interface and graphing should look pretty familiar.

Cheers!

--Claus Valca

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