Performance:Tools
Profiling tools
The following tools are used to measure product performance.
- Rational PurifyPlus. (Commercial) Used to be called Rational Quantify.
- qfy2html.pl. A Perl script for munging Quantify 6.0 output into hyperlinked HTML to share with your friends. Run Quantify, save your results as text, and then let this thing rip.
- Quantifying Mozilla on Solaris. Instructions on how to make Quantify play nicely with Mozilla on Solaris.
- For performance work on Mac, you can use either the Metrowerks Profiler (on subsets of the codebase), or Apple's Instrumentation SDK. For details, see the page on Mac performance.
- hiprof. A hierarchical instruction profiler for Digital Unix. There is an online tutorial, courtesy Jim Nance (jim_nance@yahoo.com):
- "I like it because it does not require you to recompile the program, because it give accurate times for callers, and because it comes with DU so that everyone developing there should already have it." *
- jprof. Sampling profiling tool by Jim Nance that runs on RedHat 6.1, 6.2.
- MOZ_TIMELINE Timing instrumentation. Extremely useful for app startup measurements.
- eazel profilers. Two profiling tools from Eazel/gnome.org, runs on Linux.
- JS Runtime Profiler. Profile JavaScript usage, dumps output to a file.
- Sysinternals utilities. Win9x/Me/NT/2K utilites for monitoring system usage. CPU/Mon, Diskmon, Filemon, Regmon, etc.
- gprof. Part of the GNU Binutils. Back in May 1999 there were rumors that gprof had trouble with dynamically linked and loaded objects (like Mozilla). Currently (March 2006) gprof is still being developed, so hopefully that's no longer true (assuming it ever was). The link to the gprof manual above is *years* out of date but, at the time of writing, it's the latest version of the manual on gnu.org. To get an up to date version of the manual, get the gprof source and run |. configure; make html| in the gprof source directory.