Re: Profiling GTK within an application

[Stefan Kost <ensonic hora-obscura de>]

Chris Rorvick schrieb:
> I'm attempting to profile GTK in an application and I'm wondering what 
> methodology others use to accomplish this.  Is there any documentation 
> that addresses this topic that I should refer to?  Any caveats worth 
> pointing out?  Here is where I'm at ...
>
> I recently upgraded an application using GTK 2.6 to use GTK 2.10, 
> quickly followed by an upgrade to 2.12.  In both cases, the upgraded 
> version of the application consumed 3-5x the CPU as compared to the 
> original version using 2.6.  This comparison was done anecdotally using 
> top on a Solaris workstation.
This is most likely caused by cairo. You should also see a bit less CPU usage in
2.12 compared to 2.10 (or more precise newer cairo should perform a bit better).

> My first step was to have profiled versions of these libraries built in 
> the hope that I could use them to isolate where the additional cycles 
> were being burned.  Several builds and profiled runs later, and after a 
> fair amount of searching the Internet, I've concluded that I'll never 
> get anything out of shared objects instrumented with GCC; all code to be 
> profiled must be statically linked.  If you know this to be untrue, 
> please let me know!  :)  My plan now is to build static versions of all 
> GTK libraries instrumented for profiling and link against those.
I would suggest to use a sampling profiler, like oprofile, sysprof, but all
those are linux profilers (they need a kernel module). But I am sure there a
sampling profilers for solaris too. The advantage is that you don't need to
recompile your apps (given you have debug symbols alreday) and it works with
shared libs too.

Stefan


> FYI, Our platform is Solaris 10 (x86) compiling with GCC 3.4.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Chris Rorvick
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