More profiling goodies

Time for another update! Most of the changes happened behind the scenes. I wasted a few days because of my naive assumption that the text rendering process presented in the previous post actually works. It seems to, but apparently it causes some GTK calls to randomly hang. And I do mean randomly. The error doesn’t even seem to be related to text rendering per se, but it stops occurring as soon as I remove the call to drawPixBuf. This is something to look into later, but there’s no point pursuing it at the moment.

The changes on the surface are not really spectacular, but they might be useful. After giving up on my text rendering ambitions I added cost centre lists next to the graphs, and also the ability to toggle accumulated and separate views. The lists can be sorted according to the total cost for each cost centre, and as we hover over the graph, the cost centre under the cursor is highlighted on the list. See for yourself:



The extra options can be found under the fourth button next to the left arrow in the graph headers.

As for library interfaces, one major change is the removal of the network protocol for the most part. My original idea was to create a remote controllable graphing application, but I ended up factoring graph rendering routines into a library, which removed the need for serialising various commands. The other change is the introduction of the Stats module, which makes it possible to efficiently query the heap profile in various ways. In particular, you can get the maximum individual cost, the maximum total cost (at a given moment) and the integral of any cost centre for any time range, and you can also extract samples collected during a given time interval. All this requires a preprocessing phase which can be performed in nearly linear time.

From now on, I’ll be concentrating on the interface of the history manager, and after adding some features I’ll also write a tutorial/manual for the applications.