Question on code profiling

So what do you guys use to profile your code? Something open source or off the shelf? Rolled your own?

Just curious about other people's personal experience and what has worked for them.

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

What do I use to profile my code ?
my nose

Seriously, I don't profile at all. That's a bad habit I know, but I never managed to understand how it worked with MSVC and I'm too lazy -or perhaps too many other things to do- to figure it out

Aspirin has written a REALLY KICKASS profiler class for his JoeBot XP, he sent it to me once ago but I don't know if he considers it open source or not and I'm not sure he would authorize me to post it here... better ask him But wait, when I mean really kickass, it's really WHIPPING!!

[botman]

The Half-Life SDK comes with a "Profile" build option, but I've never managed to get it to work properly. Other people on the Wavelength forum have reported to have gotten the profile build to run and generate profile information, so you might try posting a message in the Coders forum on thewavelength.net

botman

[@$3.1415rin]

no problem with publishing that code ... although there is no nice doc yet

last weekend I worked on gcc compatability, therefore some stuff isnt funny debugged yet, especially CTime::CPUSpeed::getCyclesDifference.
Recording maximum and minimum cpu usage was once a feature but I had to remove it due to restructuring the code ... maybe that's something for the next weekend after the exams

this code has only be tested on a p4 2.66 and a Athlon1Ghz.

and pierre, I think the nose is the best method to profile, although you can use the debugger sometimes as a debugger, that's interesting too

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

Joe, you should attach a screenshot of how this profiler looks like in the game...

[@$3.1415rin]

ok, this is how it currently looks like ... I really gotta readd that maximum and minimum stuff again


The first line shows where we are in the tree and what's the current percentage of the stuff that is shown ... all % values below are then relative to this. Below we can see which functions are called. if a + is in front of it, we can go there with the cursor and browse deeper to the tree ... ( the cursor is the ------- line )

[koraX]

uhm what is profiler ?

[botman]

A profiler tells you how much CPU time is being spent inside each function so you can re-write all the code that's really slow to make things run faster.

botman

[@$3.1415rin]

I updated the Profiler.cpp and .h a little, now you'll also be shown a factor how much lower the minimum/maximum timespan spent there was.

[@$3.1415rin]

currently writing some little file output functions ... doesnt even produce significant lags on my old pc here - celeron 466

here a preview ( it's the data from one round CS ) : http://joebot.bots-united.org/joebotxp/test.html