Graphical Profiling / Call Graph analysis

[Acidd_UK]

I remember a post from one of the Devs a while ago showing off some wizzy graphical tool that analysed call graph and profiling date, and produced a tree-like diagram showing the function/method hierarchy and the time spent in those functions.

Can anyone remember the tool(s) used, or can anyone find the post I'm talking about? I've searched various topics but I can't find the thing

[SirMaverick]

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=19359

[Acidd_UK]

Thanks, now I just need to find out how the graph was generated!

[BrainDamage]

I used oprofile ( linux only ) for the data acquisition:
http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/about/

Code: Select all

# opcontrol -c=16 -p=library,thread,cpu --no-vmlinux
# opcontrol --start
$ spring ( must contain debug symbols )
# opcontrol --stop
# opcontrol --flush
$ opreport -cgf --demangle=smart --exclude-dependent --merge=tgid,cpu,tid --symbols /path/to/spring > calldata.txt

oprof is a statistical profiler, you might want to calculate number of samples to have error confidence less than your acceptable level

gprof2dot to convert the table data into a graph script
http://code.google.com/p/jrfonseca/wiki/Gprof2Dot

Code: Select all

$ gprof2dot -f oprofile -o dotgraph.dot calldata.txt

gprof2dot can convert from multiple profiling tools, but I found oprofile to be best since it only requires debug symbols in the binary to work, and the slowdown it introduces is neglectable
either you're running linux, windows, or mac you could try gprof, altho it requires for the binary to be compiled using special gprof symbols, slows down the app to grind levels, and I find it somehow crappier than oprof. ( after compiling the app with the special symbols, you'll have to run it and parse the binary profile data with the gprof tool in order to make it readble from the script, make sure you'll enable call graph output from gprof )

graphviz to render the graph script http://www.graphviz.org/

$ dot -T svg -o svggraph.svg dotgraph.dot

[Acidd_UK]

That's fantastic - we've actually used oprofile already but I didn't know about gprof2dot - thanks!