EXTENSIBLE PERFORMANCE STATISTICS AND TRACING REGISTRATION ARCHITECTURE

A hierarchical registration architecture manages and organizes the collection of performance information, such as statistics and tracing, for an extensible operating system of a computer. The registration architecture, or registry, comprises a multi-linked tree data structure within a main memory for accessing the performance information. Writer entities register their intent to collect and store performance information in the registry by creating objects, via novel API calls, as nodes organized within the tree structure. Each object node of the registry is named according to a convention that identifies the type of performance data collected by that node. Each object node further represents a single data item having a single data type for collecting the performance and a reference to the actual storage location of its collected performance information. Information storage preferably occurs in globally-shared memory so that any software entity can access the information.