Re: Treemap Visualization for profiling output

[Hans-Bernhard Broeker]

Alexander Rawass <address@hidden> wrote:

> Treemaps are a 'new' way of displaying a hierarchical tree in a
> graphics area.  
[...]


> The output of gprof can be seen as hierarchical data, where each
> element is a block of the program that has been accessed n times or
> for t seconds.  

Execution counts aren't hierarchical in the way a treeview expects it.
Just because a function calls some other function ten thousand times
doesn't mean its own execution must be at least ten thousand.

Neither is gprof output truly hierarchical, because program flow isn't
restricted to a tree-shaped graph. A gprof output graph would usually
have to be a directed acyclig graph (DAG), not a tree. In particular,
there may be undirected circles. And that's after gprof itself has
collapsed all circles in the original graph, before outputting
anything.

> Or could I even use gprof itself as the basics for this viewer
> application?  

You should do that, yes.  gprof is a rather involved program,
itself. You don't want to rewrite it from scratch, trust me...

-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (address@hidden)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.