Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Mono Visual Profiler

We're seeking the input of profiler users and other interested parties to help create a visual profiling tool for mono applications. Development is under way in the mono-tools module alongside the current command line decoder. The tool is a UI to interact with the built-in mono logging profiler and graphically display captured profile logs. The visualization capabilities of the tool are still fairly primitive, but it is already capable of creating and displaying log data for instrumented, allocation, and statistical profiles.

I have created a wiki page to track the feature capabilities and plans. There is also a "Visual Profiler" category for bug reporting and enhancement requests in the Mono:Tools bugzilla product. Discussion will occur on mono-devel-list.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

First: I hope this doesn't end up sounding in some way inappropriate. I swear I've got no vested interest other than being a happy user.

That said, I'd suggest taking a look at the latest versions of RedGate's performance[1] & memory[2] profiling tools for inspiration. They're the best I've found so far in terms of ease of use.

In particular, the the new v5 of the memory profiler is vastly easier to use for tracking memory leaks than anything else I've seen.

Also, the ability to focus on a particular time interval in the performance profiler is very useful.

Damn. I really do sound like a salesman. Sorry.

[1] http://www.red-gate.com/products/ants_performance_profiler
[2] http://www.red-gate.com/products/ants_memory_profiler

Pablo Santos said...

Absolutely swythan,

In fact after testing RedGate's Ants 5, it's the best one I've seen.

Since Ants can not only track memory at runtime but also inspect it afterwards, I wonder if the log you generate could reused by Ants.

I DO know you probably prefer having an opensource counterpart, but think for a second how good would be to have a professional tool in our beloved Mono environment.

Tommaso said...

I find very useful the Kcachegrind
callee map graph:
http://kcachegrind.sourceforge.net/html/CalleeMap.html

LogicMagic said...

JProf and the other Java profilers are a good place to look as well. I would like to be able to see threads and what they do and when...

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