Re: Profiling GTK within an application

[Ivan Baldo <ibaldo adinet com uy>]

   Hello Chris!
   There are different types of profiling:
      1 - application code profiling (gprof), it only profiles the code 
of the application without taking into account the libraries it uses and 
other factors like X and your hardware and video card.
      2 - application code and libraries code profiling (qprof), it 
only profiles the code of the application and the code of the libraries 
without taking into account other processes that interact with your 
application like X and your hardware and video card.
      3 - system wide profiling (sysprof, oprofile), it profiles all 
code of all proceses including the kernel and drivers.

   All that types of profiling may or may not take into account the 
time of the function and all the functions it calls (flat view or call 
graph respectively), and they may or may not take into account the time 
spent sleeping (sometimes because it is waiting for another process to 
finish, like for example for X to process the request and the hardware 
drawing the screen).

   So taking into account all that, one needs to decide what specific 
kind of profiling it needs, and then find the tool for the job.
   In your case, you say that "top" is showing that your application 
process is using more CPU than before, and also you say that the 
slowdown doesn't come from your application but from a library (GTK+ 
suite), so I guess that for that case what you need is a profiler that 
shows you the CPU time used by functions in your code accumulating the 
time used in the functions that it calls (from GTK+ or your 
application), that will help determine what functions of your code take 
the most time to fulfill, and then you can look at those functions to 
change the way you use GTK+ to optimize your use of GTK+ and avoid the 
slowdown, or maybe to see what functions of GTK+ are slowing down your 
application and see if you can optimize that functions in GTK+ itself.
   Discard the group 1 (gprof and maybe others). You can select group 2 
or 3.
   If QProf is compatible with Solaris and you can build it with 
libunwind then it can show you a call graph of your functions and 
library functions and the accumulated and segregated times of each, the 
default mode of operation is to show used CPU time and thats precisely 
what you need, but you can also instruct it to take into account the 
time the function sleeps, if you keep your application busy then it will 
mostly sleep for X or another process or hardware item to finish your 
request and it could be useful too.
   Sysprof and OPriofile can do that too (the call graph), but they are 
Linux specific, but maybe there is something similar for Solaris, at 
this time they don't take into account the time the process/function 
sleeps but you don't need that.
   Since now you know what type of profiling you need, maybe you can 
ask on a Solaris specific mailing list, forum or IRC channel for that 
type of profiler.

   Hope this helps! Good luck.

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