Profiling X, KDE, KWin and friends...

[Adam Jackson]

On Thu, 2009-04-16 at 19:53 -0600, Jerry James wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 2:52 AM, Ilyes Gouta <ilyes.gouta at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Alright, thank you guys for the information. I'm gonna try sysprof out, it
> > looks like it's THE tool I'm looking for!
> 
> Has anyone compared sysprof with oprofile?  I'm going to need a system
> profiler Real Soon Now, and I'm wondering how they compare to each
> other.

They're fairly different approaches to the problem.  oprofile is an
expert tool, it exposes basically every performance counter on the
system with no particularly strong emphasis on UI.  If you happen to
know that cache misses or TLD flushes or whatever are what's killing
you, then it'll show you exactly where and why.  If you just want to
know where your CPU time is going, oprofile will have you missing the
forest for the bark on the trees.

sysprof, on the other hand, just wants to show you where you're spending
CPU time.  You click start, do some stuff that you want to profile, and
then click profile, and it gives you a tree view of stack traces showing
where it sampled you as spending time.  Does only the one thing, but
does it really well.

I find that I reach for sysprof first, and will eventually resort to
oprofile if the problem is complex and rare enough to need it.

- ajax


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