Timeline

Process overview

The Process Overview diagram visualizes application activity and meaningful events related to the profiled application. Use the diagram to determine and select time intervals that are interesting for analysis, such as intervals with a high CPU load, long blocking GC intervals, and UI freeze intervals.

Timeline Overview

Use the overview to evaluate CPU utilization and to quickly navigate in Process Overview and Threads diagrams:

• Click anywhere on the overview to select a visible time range. The range size is defined automatically.

• Drag the slide bar to select a visible time range.

• Move the slide bar edges to change its size.

• Use the zoom slider on the left to zoom the Process Overview and Threads diagrams.

Blocking Garbage Collection

Time intervals where the blocking garbage collection (GC) takes place. To perform a blocking GC, CLR suspends all managed threads. For more information about the GC analysis, refer to the Garbage Collection event.

UI Freeze

Time intervals where the user interface is not responding. More specifically, these are time intervals where window messages are not pumped for more than 200 ms or processing of a particular message takes more than 200 ms.

Filtered Time Intervals

Time intervals that were selected as a result of applying filters.

Threads diagram

The Threads diagram visualizes threads activity and filtered time intervals (in case filters are applied). Use the diagram to select threads and time intervals that are interesting for analysis.

The diagram shows the following data for each thread:

ID	Thread identifier.
Type	Thread name (shown only for managed threads) or thread type (if a thread does not have a name). dotTrace distinguishes the following thread types: Main   – a thread that starts the application. Thread Pool   – a thread created by the CLR Thread Pool. CLR Worker   – a worker thread created by CLR. Garbage Collection   – a thread that performs background garbage collection. Finalizer   – a thread that performs object finalization. Native   – an unmanaged system thread.
ms / MB / events	Filtered time / allocated memory / number of events. For example, if Not Selected event is selected and no other filters are applied, this will be the entire thread lifetime. If, for instance, you select Waiting in the Thread State filter, this time will be a sum of all Waiting time intervals.
%	The percentage of the filtered time / allocated memory / number of events relative to all selected time intervals / allocated memory / number of events.
Thread activity timeline	The timeline distinguishes three thread states: Running, Waiting, Ready (corresponding to the Thread State filter). After you apply any filter, the timeline will highlight the filtered time intervals or point events. Thread timeline can also show detailed info about activity in a particular time point in a smart tooltip. To view the tooltip, hover over a specific time point. Tooltips are context-sensitive and show additional data depending on the selected filters.

Select threads

In some cases, it may be convenient to select all threads of a particular type.

Hide threads

To simplify analysis, you can hide threads that are not currently interesting (for example, do not perform any work on the selected time interval).

Sort threads

By default, the list of threads is sorted by their creation order. By clicking on the column headers, you can sort threads by other conditions: ID, Type, ms / MB / events, %. The column that is currently used for sorting is marked with the sign.

In some cases, it may be convenient to have a certain thread on top of the list regardless of the sorting order. Use the Move to Top option in the thread's context menu to move any thread to the top.

Select time intervals

You can also use the diagram to quickly select UI freeze intervals.

Zoom the diagram

If a time interval is selected on the diagram, you can zoom in to this interval.

Pan the diagram