CODEWITHSUNDEEP
performance
DGentry
DGentry

Reputation: 16248

Profiling visualization tools?

I need to display profiling information pulled from a deeply embedded CPU, presenting it in a way which other developers on my team will be able to act upon. The profiling data is a snapshot of a cycle counter at the entry and exit of every function, so we have a call graph annotated with sub-microsecond timing accuracy. I'd prefer not to just dump out function names and timing like gprof, I'm looking for something easier to understand and act upon.

Has anyone worked with a particularly good profiling tool (on any platform), which made it easy to identify areas of the code to drill into? I'm looking for an inspirational example to follow for how to display the call graph, but if there is good tool with an input format I can massage my data to I'll use it. I could use Windows, Linux, or MacOS X to run the visualization tool.

A profiling article on IBM DeveloperWorks led me to GraphViz, with a profiling example on their site. Barring another suggestion here, I'll use GraphViz and mimic their profiling example.

Upvotes: 19

Views: 13945

Answers (9)

none
none

Reputation: 5755

Another neat tool to visualize profiling data is the gprof2dot.py python script. It can be used to visualize several different formats: "This is a Python script to convert the output from prof, gprof, oprofile, Shark, AQtime, and python profilers into a dot graph." This is what the output look like:


(source: googlecode.com)

Upvotes: 18

Ami Tavory
Ami Tavory

Reputation: 76297

I've written a browser-based visualization tool, profile_eye, which operates on the output of gprof2dot.

gprof2dot is great at grokking many profiling-tool outputs, and does a great job at graph-element placement. The final rendering is a static graphic, which is often very cluttered.

Using d3.js it's possible to remove much of that clutter, through relative fading of unfocused elements, tooltips, and a fisheye distortion.

For comparison, see profile_eye's visualization of the canonical example used by gprof2dot.

Upvotes: 0

Amani AlAli
Amani AlAli

Reputation: 21

You can use Senseo, a plugin for Eclipse. It shows you the performance, memory allocation, objects created, time spent, actual methods invoked, hover over method signatures or calls, call context tree, package explorer and more.

Upvotes: 2

rodrigob
rodrigob

Reputation: 41

I use Kprof http://kprof.sourceforge.net/

it is old, but I never found a better tool to inspect the results from gprof.

Upvotes: 4

Frank
Frank

Reputation: 66194

Valgrind does profiling (and more), and there are GUIs for visualization.

Upvotes: 3

Joe Ho
Joe Ho

Reputation: 928

How about "GTKWave"? But you have to insert the probe in your code.

Upvotes: 3

Prestaul
Prestaul

Reputation: 85155

IE 8b2 offers a simple display of the call tree for javascript that I believe is much more useful than the GraphViz chart.

The GraphViz chart is wonderful for visualizing the call tree but makes it very difficult to visualize timing issues (IMHO the more important data).

**Edit: I thought it is worth pointing out that all of the tools suggested use a grid based tree to visualize the call tree. This allows you to see the calling structure without downplaying the timing data as I believe you do with the GraphViz chart.*

Upvotes: 2

Garo Yeriazarian
Garo Yeriazarian

Reputation: 2533

JetBrains dotTrace (has a trial demo you can play with). It organizes the call stacks and can easily find the trouble spots. Has a lot of filtering capabilities as well. Very easy to navigate and find what you're looking for.

Upvotes: 2

elmarco
elmarco

Reputation: 32993

I suggest you drop gprof+graphviz for OProfileUI, unless you don't have a choice.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions