Re: Treemap for sysprof

[Soeren Sandmann <sandmann cs au dk>]

Hi,

> I'm a big fan and user of sysprof.

Glad you like it.

> After using applications which visualize resource allocations using
> treemaps, sysprof seems to me to ripe for just this feature. It's one
> I would greatly appreciate myself.
>
> Three examples of applications implementing this (with slightly
> different treemap concepts) are  gdmap, baobab and kcachgrind (which
> incidentally is used very similarly to sysprof)
>
> Example screen shots:
>
>   gdmap:       http://gdmap.sourceforge.net/img/gdmap-preview.png
>   baobab:      http://library.gnome.org/users/baobab/stable/figures/baobab_fullscan.png.en
>   kcachegrind: http://kcachegrind.sourceforge.net/shot3-02.png
>
> I've started to hack apart gdmap to pull out its treemap
> implementation for a proof of concept for sysprof.
>
> If there's interest I'd be interested in cleaning it up for
> integration, or trying to do the same for baobab's ring based treemap
> if there was more interest there.

It's a feature that has been suggested from time to time, so there is
clearly some interest in it, and I agree it would be a useful new
feature.

The main concern I would have with adding a tree map view to Sysprof is
whether it can be integrated with the rest of the UI in a clean
way. With the current three-pane layout, it would be fairly
straightforward to just add new View->tree/tree radio menu items and
have them switch between Tree and Tree Map views.

However, this branch:

    http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~sandmann/sysprof/log/?h=newui

contains an experimental new UI that removes two of the three panes and
simply shows all the data in one big tree. I have been using it for a
while and think it's mostly an improvement on the current UI, so I'm
considering switching to it for the 1.3.x series. A downside though is
that it's much less obvious how to integrate a tree map view there.

Comments appreciated on that.


Thanks,
Soren