Re: Looking for help profiling GNUstep programs

[Andrew Ruder]

Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> Am I doing something stupid?
> Does anyone have experience with profiling share objc libraries (I'm 
> working on debian unstable intel).

I've had a good deal of luck with oprofile (which requires a kernel 
component) for debugging gnustep.  With a 2.6.12 kernel, a kernel patch 
is not required even for the callgraph support.  Simply compile with 
debug symbols, start the oprofile daemon, run your program (in fact, you 
can even start oprofile daemon while the program is running, i believe, 
if you want to just profile a certain section).  Oprofile can even 
output gprof compatible output.

The other choice is valgrind with the callgrind tool.  I had to get 
callgrind from their website and compile against my own valgrind due to 
having some issues with the debian package for callgrind being much too 
old.  Running your program under callgrind should not affect the actual 
profiling results, but your program will run insanely slowly as with any 
valgrind utility.

I've had a lot of luck with both, and oprofile is amazingly easy and 
simple to use and hardly affects the speed at which your program runs. 
I tried to use profile=yes a few weeks ago and ran into a lot of issues 
and finally gave up...

Cachegrind:
http://kcachegrind.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/show.cgi/KcacheGrindIndex

Oprofile: (Although debian + 2.6.12 kernel has all the components to 
fully utilize oprofile, iirc)
http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/news/

Hope that helps,
Andy

--
Andrew Ruder <address@hidden>
http://www.aeruder.net