Find unoptimized parts of MSBuild

[Forgind]

Use ETW EventSource traces to collect performance data on a large project system.
Open results in PerfView to see which methods have the greatest impact on performance.

[aolszowka]

If you have a document for what you are looking for I'm willing to do some legwork; we have several large solution files that we could submit traces for.

I have used ETW only sporadically when tracking down kernel bugs so I am very green with that tool but reading Bruce Dawson's blog is always enlightening (https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/63-cores-blocked-by-seven-instructions/)

[Forgind]

Thanks, aolszowka!

I should note for clarity, since I didn’t mention it in the issue, that this issue was originally intended as an internal marker to remind our team to get more proficient with collecting and analyzing traces from some EventSources I recently added to MSBuild. If you’d like to help us learn through this process, we’d be happy for the help, but we can’t promise much right now.

I put some comments on how to use the EventSources I recently added in https://github.com/microsoft/msbuild/blob/master/documentation/specs/event-source.md
That should help with getting the tracing to work from the command line; since MSBuild is mostly used from Visual Studio, we’re more interested in how it performs there, but we haven’t nailed down how to do that yet. Any help would be greatly appreciated, but if this sounds like too little bang for your buck, we understand.

Have a great day!

[aolszowka]

I assume this means I need to build against source that at least includes your changes on #4802 and #4805 are there any others that need to be targeted?

[Forgind]

#4802 and #4805 were so I could run more comprehensive tests. #4724 has all of their changes plus additional tweaks I made afterwards, so that's the important one.

[AR-May]

[Perf triage] There is no activity in this issue for quite a lot of time. @Forgind, do you still need this issue? If no, I'd suggest closing it.

[Forgind]

It's still something we're definitely planning to do and doing, to some extent, but to be honest, I'd forgotten there was an issue for it. Not sure if that puts it in the relevant or irrelevant category. Probably irrelevant.