Where Profiling Sucks (April 05, 2010)
Ok, you should know by now that I love profiling and making things faster. Yet there’s always a “but”. For me it’s blocking syscalls, or anything that makes the app “slow” for the user but doesn’t show up in Callgrind as the Instruction Fetch cost doesn’t go up.
The usual suspect is of course locks (which we have quite a lot in KDevelop) or QProcesses with waitForFinished() or similar… You won’t see them in any Callgrind profile. Does anyone know a way to achieve that? Something that makes Callgrind increase the Ir cost for blocking func calls depending on the time it blocks? Or some other tool that would show me these?
And if you are interested: I was still able to find the cause for slow parsing of Custom Make Manager projects (Qt, Linux Kernel, …) in KDevelop: The cache in the IncludePathResolver never hit, since a operator== was improperly implemented ;-) I really wonder how we could have missed that for so long! I’ve also added some more changes that should make it much faster to parse projects that rely on the IncludePathResolver. I was personally now able to parse 10.000 files of the Linux Kernel in about 9.5 minutes. This is roughly a third of the Kernel, so I’d get to a total of approx 30min. Compare that to the 2.5h for 5% that one of our users reported ;-)