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When a software trace is lengthy it is useful to partition it into several regions based on a sequence of Anchor Messages. The choice of them can be determined by a Vocabulary Index or an Adjoint Thread of Activity. For example, an ETW trace with almost 900,000 messages recorded during a desktop connection for 6 minutes can be split into 14 segments by the adjoint thread of DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH message (the message was generated by DllMain of an injected module, not shown in the trace output for formatting clarity):

#      PID  TID  Time         Message
24226  2656 3480 10:41:05.774 AppA.exe: DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH     
108813 4288 4072 10:41:05.774 AppB.exe: DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH
112246 4180 3836 10:41:05.940 DllHost.exe: DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH
135473 2040 3296 10:41:12.615 AppC.exe: DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH
694723 1112 1992 10:44:23.393 AppD.exe: DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH
703962 5020 1080 10:44:42.014 DllHost.exe: DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH
705511 4680 3564 10:44:42.197 DllHost.exe: DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH
705891 1528 2592 10:44:42.307 regedit.exe: DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH
785231 2992 4912 10:45:26.516 AppE.exe: DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH
786523 3984 1156 10:45:26.605 powershell.exe: DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH
817979 4188 4336 10:45:48.707 wermgr.exe: DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH
834875 3976 1512 10:45:52.342 LogonUI.exe: DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH
835229 4116 3540 10:45:52.420 AppG.exe: DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH

Each region can be analyzed independently for any anomalies, for example, to look for the answer to the question why wermgr.exe was launched. An example of partitioning is illustrated on the following schematic diagram:

 

It is also possible to make another trace segmentation by interleaving regions above with another set of anchor messages comprising of the adjoint thread of DLL_PROCESS_DETACH message:

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org + TraceAnalysis.org -

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 11:08 pm and is filed under CDF Analysis Tips and Tricks, Debugging, Software Trace Analysis, Trace Analysis Patterns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.