More colourful graphs

In order to make it easier to compare cost centres, I added a cumulative view that works the same way as hp2ps. Generating appropriate colours is tricky when you don’t know the data in advance, but the result is at least satisfactory for the time being. Hovering over an area causes the name of the respective cost centre to be displayed in the top left corner, as illustrated by the following screenshots:



The vertical magnification of the graph depends on the last 50 samples, so a huge spike will squeeze the diagram only for a limited amount of time, as you can see on the screenshots too.

Of course, the line graphs are also available, but the two can’t be toggled during a single run yet, so here’s a picture from another one (the lines are broken at places, because the Gnome screenshotter can’t seem to keep up with the animation):



What’s next? The first thing to do is to optimise graphing, because everything is recalculated for each frame in the current snapshot, and it doesn’t take long for the visualiser to stress the CPU more than the program we’re profiling... Pushing everything into display lists should take care of that. The next step is to add the means to stop the animation and look around in the graph, and also the option to display only the last portion while animating the graph.

When the grapher works fine as a standalone application, I’ll start extending it with remote control capabilities as outlined on the project wiki.