Tracealyzer Concepts and Terminology

Term	Definition
Actor	A thread.
Actor Instance	An execution of an Actor. This is the set of all fragments connected by the same colored band. It represents the time from when RtWaitForSingleObject(Ex) or RtWaitForMultipleObjects(Ex) returns or when the thread voluntarily yields control of the processor, such as with Sleep or a call to a blocking API other than waiting on an object. For a handler function, such as an IST or timer handler, the execution of the handler is a single actor instance. In all other cases, the following applies: An actor instance starts when a thread begins execution or when it resumes execution after the end of a previous actor instance. An actor instance ends when the thread sleeps or blocks in a call to RtWaitForSingleObject(Ex) or RtWaitForMultipleObjects(Ex), with the exception that blocking on a mutex never ends an actor instance.
Execution Time	The amount of CPU time used by an Actor Instance, excluding pre-emptions.
Response Time	The time from the start of an Actor Instance until it finishes. Note that Response Time is counted from the start of execution of the actor instance, not from when the thread becomes ready to execute.
Fragment	A time interval when a specific Actor executes uninterrupted. Fragments are visualized as colored rectangles in the scheduling trace. A fragment belongs to a specific Actor Instance, which is the set of all fragments connected by the same colored band.
Fragmentation	The number of fragments within an Actor Instance. If an Actor Instance executes in full without pre-emptions, the fragmentation of the instance is 1.
Kernel Object	A RTX64 object, such as an event, semaphore, mutex, or thread.
Kernel Service	An API call (service) provided by the RTX64 subsystem, usually performing an operation on one or more kernel objects.
Periodicity	The time between two consecutive instances of an Actor, counted from the start of the previous Actor Instance to the start of the current Actor Instance.
Separation	The time between two consecutive instances of an Actor, counted from the end of the previous Actor Instance to the start of the current Actor Instance.
User Event	A custom event generated by RtGenerateEvent. Custom user events carry up to 512 bytes of arbitrary data. Custom user Events also carry an unsigned integer in the range 0 to 999, which can be used to distinguish different User Events and control their formatting via the User Event customization XML file. See Defining Parsing Rules for Custom Events in Tracealyzer for more information.