Random ASCII – tech blog of Bruce Dawson

I haven’t been blogging much lately, and it turns out there is a very good reason. My last technical blog post was October 1st of last year. After I hit publish on that one I went to get ready for … Continue reading →

The Guardian is one of my favorite news sources. I’m a subscriber (support news organizations!) and I read it daily. But it is not immune to errors, as this headline shows: 68 °F above average is a lot. For a … Continue reading →

Memory is a relatively scarce resource on many consumer computers, so a feature to limit how much memory a process uses seems like a good idea, and Microsoft did indeed implement such a feature. However: They didn’t document this (!) … Continue reading →

TL;DR – upgrade your tools, including Visual Studio, windbg, and Windows Performance Toolkit, if you want to handle Chromium’s symbol files. Details: Death, taxes, and browser engines relentlessly growing – those are the three things that you can really be … Continue reading →

I tend to launch most programs on my Windows 10 laptop by typing the key, then a few letters of the program name, and then hitting enter. On my powerful laptop (SSD and 32 GB of RAM) this process … Continue reading →

Last month I wrote about an odd crash that was hitting a few Chrome users. Something was corrupting the XMM7 register and that was causing Chrome to crash. We fixed a couple of bugs in Chrome and we were able … Continue reading →

“Hey, you. Yes you, that function over there. When you’re cleaning up please remember to restore all of my registers. Yes, that one too – what do you think this is, Linux?” That’s the problem I was dealing with in … Continue reading →

I apologize for this title because there are many things that can make modern software slow. Blindly applying one explanation without a bit of investigation is the software equivalent of a cargo cult. That said, this post describes one example … Continue reading →

While investigating some performance mysteries in Chrome I discovered that Microsoft had parallelized how they zero memory, and in some cases this was making it a lot slower. This slowdown may be mitigated in Windows 11 but in the latest … Continue reading →

In 2004 I was working for Microsoft in the Xbox group, and a new console was being created. I got a copy of the detailed descriptions of the Xbox 360 CPU and I read it through multiple times and suddenly … Continue reading →

It was literally the day after I cracked the __FILE__ determinism bug that I hit a completely different build determinism issue. I was asked to investigate why the Chrome build number reported for Chrome crashes on Windows 11 was lagging … Continue reading →