Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 6 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm looking for a profiler to use with native C++. It certainly does not have to be free, however cost does factor into the purchase decision. This is for commercial work so I can't use personal or academic licensed copies.
The key features I'm looking for are:
Process level metrics
Component level metrics
Line-level metrics
Supports Multi-threaded code
Usability
Cost
Visual Studio 2005 Professional support required (VS 2008 Professional support highly
desirable)
I've used Intel's VTune and Compuware's Devpartner Performance Analysis Community Edition.
VTune seemed very powerful but it has a steep learning curve. It also is very "modular" so you have to figure out what parts are you need to buy.
DevPartner PACE was pretty easy to use and provides all of the key features however it's only a 45-day trial. The licensed version (DevPartner for Visual C++ BoundsChecker Suite) is about $1400 a seat, which is doable but a bit high imo.
What are some good profilers for native C++ and WHY?
See also:
What's Your Favorite Profiling Tool For C++
On Windows, GlowCode is affordable, fairly easy to use, and offers a free trial so you can see if it works for you.
Try Intel Parallel Studio. Currently, it's in beta, but the name Intel says it all.
http://www.intel.com/go/parallel
Many people are not aware but MSFT is making a great progress putting the best possible tools for improving performance in the hands of devlopers for free :-). They are exposing to all of us the internals of Windows tracing: ETW.
perftools
It is part of the new windows SDK for server 2008 and Vista. Simply impressive and must to download if performance analysis and profiling under Windows is your goal (regardless of language).
Check the documentation here before you decide to download it:
msdn doc
Just found Luke StackWalker on SourceForge (http://lukestackwalker.sourceforge.net/).
Unfortunately it does not have a 'focus on sub tree', but it remains handy to use, uses the symbol server (I suggest you set it up immediately if you don't have it yet), offers a graphical visualisation, ...
The down side is that it doesn't show the accumulated times (samples) of the child functions.
Another alternative is "Very Sleepy" (http://www.codersnotes.com/sleepy). It can show the accumulated times of the children, but unfortunately it doesn't use the symbol server.
CodeXL may also be worth looking at, it can run on both Linux and Windows, although it is mainly dedicated to OpenGL/OpenCL debugging and profiling there is a time based sample option for CPUs under the profiling section which maybe helpful. It's also free and works as long as pdb files are available (well on windows, I don't know how it works on Linux) (even for release builds with pdb).
Definitely Visual Studio Team System. By far.
I just finished the first usable version of CxxProf, a portable manual instrumented profiling library for C++.
It fulfills your requirements:
Profiles multithreaded applications
Support for profiling multiple processes throughout the same network is on the way
It is written with the best usability and easiest integration in mind
It's free as in beer and free as in speech
It will work with VS05,08,10,12 and 13. As well as with g++ on Linux. It's currently tested with VS 2013 Express.
See the project wiki for more info.
Disclaimer: Im the main developer of CxxProf
I wrote an open source lightweight win32/64 profiler, support both CPU and memory profiling,
it's kind of similar with VS profiler, but with unique feature like flame graph of CPU and
memory data. it's here: dprofiler
Related
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
Which tools would be most useful for analyzing a C++ codebase?
What do they cost?
Can we manage with free and trial software, or are there commercial software that is good and that we really should to pay for?
The main object would be to get an understanding of quality - memory issues etc, also to understand the code (For spotting architectural problems for example), perhaps coding standards.
Primarily statical analysis, but we are hoping to be able to run the code.
Think it needs to be "robust in the sense that it should work with code for arcane compilers.
The best free tool is your compiler's warning errors, I always use them at maximum level. The first goal should be a clean build without any cheating (eg. disabling or casting away not-understood warnings).
Visual C++ has built in Code Analysis which is good for catching some bugs and Win32 API misuse, but it's not included in the free version and is (obviously) Windows-specific. This used to be an internal Microsoft tool called Prefast - analogous to FxCop in .Net.
PC-Lint is good, but verbose and not free. If you can get a config file to trap 'useful things' and ignore the noise, that would be a big plus. Again this is for Windows, but I know there are versions for other platforms.
Take a look at:
http://www.cppdepend.com/
and a good many others:
http://www.chris-lott.org/resources/cmetrics/
http://www.locmetrics.com/alternatives.html
I've heard very good things about Valgrind. "automatically detect many memory management and threading bugs, and profile your programs in detail"
The number one stink in programs is code duplication.
You can use clone detectors to find duplicates. Many clone detectors compare just text lines for exact matches; other compare token streams and will find almost-exact matches where the differences are just changed identifiers. You can use our CloneDR to find duplication in which arbitrary langauge structures are inserted or removed, using the langauge grammar as a guide. CloneDR works for large C++ systems, as well as many other languages. At the link you can find typical clone detection reports.
A popular broad-spectrum static checker is PCLint. This checks for a variety of common coding errors predefined by the tool. I don't know how well it handles "arcane" (compilers) dialects of C++.
If you want to define custom checks, you need a full C++ front end parser and the ability to configure your checks arbitrarily. Our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit is an engine that can be configured to accomplish this. DMS's C++ front end can be configured to handle "arcane" C++ dialects, but already covers ANSI, GCC3 and GCC4, MS Visual Studio 7 and 2005. Because DMS is a program transformation engine, it can even be used to "improve" the code quality by replacing poor constructs with better ones.
While not static analysis, test coverage tools for measuring how well you've tested your code are very helpful in assessing your code quality. Just because all your tests pass, doesn't mean you've tested well; unexercised code arguably can have any/all variety of problems.
Theres CCCC: http://cccc.sourceforge.net/ -- result of a research project on metrics.
To tell the truth, I've not found much benefit in such things. What do you hope to get?
You could try out Vigilant Sentry, which analyzes C and C++ and looks for advanced errors in your software. This includes memory or resources leaks, and crash causing memory corruption, among other things.
The small business edition is currently only $795 (by far the cheapest on the market for the value) and the enterprise is $4995. Good luck finding what you need.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
In VS6 times there was BoundsChecker from Numega. I understand it is dead now, please correct me if I am wrong. What are the reliable alternatives? Preferably free or at least with trial version available.
IMO It might be a better idea to write custom memory manager (the one that supports new/delete/malloc/free wrappers). Make a new/delete wrapper that locks unused/freed memory using VirtualProtect (yeah, I know that default allocation block will have to be PAGE_SIZE bytes large, and you'll need a lot of ram even for a small app, but that's the only disadvantage). If you are on linux, it probably have VirtualProtect alternative. In this case any outrageous out-of-bounds access will generate access violation and will be easy to track. Also use stl containers when possible - they also offer bounds checking.
This advice is based on experience - I had worked with a terribly written huge (several megabytes of code) old software that had memory leaks, accessed already freed memory from multiple threads and so on. I've spent week trying different utilities (purify, devpartner studio, aqtime etc), and although some of them provided loads of information, none were really helpful. With custom memory managment problems were eliminated in 2 days (that includes writing memory manager).
If that doesn't work for you, try compuware devpartner studio - if it is still available anywhere.
BoundsChecker is certainly not dead. "It's only mostly dead, which means partly alive" (sorry, cannot resist the Miracle Max quote from The Princess Bride.) Seriously, BoundsChecker is alive and thriving under Micro Focus stewardship. We are releasing DevPartner Studio with 64-bit application support in BoundsChecker, the .NET/native/mixed performance and coverage profilers, and the .NET memory and holistic CPU/network/disk IO performance profiler. Look for DPS 10.5 to ship on February 4, 2011. The 10.5 release integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010, but you can still use BC standalone to run Active Check against VC6 and VC2003 binaries with some success if needed. Shameless plug: I work on the DevPartner team. I am peppering SO with notes announcing the newfound relevance of DPS 10.5 for C++ and .NET app dev troubleshooting on the x64 platform. With the new pricing model where you can license just BC or just the perf profiler, DPS should be much more accessible than it ever was under Compuware stewardship and lofty pricing. Disclaimer: these are my own opinions not necessarily sanctioned by Micro Focus.
Boundschecker is not dead. I'm using it with Visual Studio 2008.
They just changed owners (Compuware to MicroFocus, to Borland), now it's called DevPartner for Visual C++ BoundsChecker Suite
Check this:
http://www.borland.com/Products/Software-Testing/Automated-Testing/Devpartner-Studio
Bounds Checker used to be my second favorite tool, after a good debugger. I found it incredibly useful. Then it got so freakin expensive that I was no longer able to justify its purchase. If you want to know why hardly anybody even knows about this great tool anymore, there's your answer.
I also work for Micro Focus, and am the main guy right now for the BoundsChecker (DPS Error Detection) runtime internals. The product is definitely not dead, but the main thing keeping it alive right now is the fanatical loyalty of certain people. Though loyalty only goes so far. We continue to have customers. If the product weren't selling at all, the company would have laid us all off long ago and canned the product.
Anyway, for those of you with questions or bugs to report, try our forum at http://community.microfocus.com/.
Purify (Plus)
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/purifyplus/
BoundsChecker was acquired multiple times and is now here: http://microfocus.com/products/DevPartner/BoundsCheckerSuite.asp
Another option is Rational Purify (Now owned by IBM): http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/purify/
Both of these products work, kinda. But neither are a silver bullet and bring with them a non-trivial amount of work to get useful information out of them. YMMV
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
I have years of C++ programming experience in Windows. Now I need to program some applications for Linux. Is there any resource that helps me quickly get the required information about Linux technologies available to C++ developers?
Programming in C++ under Linux isn't all that different at the core. Linux compilers are generally more standard's conforming than MSVC; however, that is changing as MSVC is becoming a better compiler. The difference is more from the environment and available libraries. Visual Studio isn't available (obviously) but some other environments like Visual SlickEdit and Eclipse are available on both.
The build system is widely varied and will probably be dictated by your preference between Gnome, KDE, or the ever-present command line. Personally, I find the latter to be the cleanest and most consistent. If you end up at the command line, then learn GNU Make and pick up a copy of GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool. This will introduce the GNU command line development stack pretty nicely.
Debugging is a lot different being that VS provides a nice GUI debugging environment. Most Linux environments simply wrap a command line debugger (usually gdb) with a GUI. The result is less than satisfactory if you expect a nicely integrated debugger. I would recommend getting comfortable with gdb. There are some decent tutorials for gdb online. Just google for a bunch of them. Once you get a little comfortable, read the online manual for the really neat stuff.
The other choice is to use whatever development environment is packaged with your windowing system or to use something like Eclipse and some C++ plug-in
As for books on the subject, Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment is a must-read. UNIX Systems Programming is also a good read since it gives you a solid grounding in shells, processes, and what not. I would recommend both the POSIX Programmer's Guide and POSIX.4 Programmer's Guide since they give you a lot of the systems programming stuff.
With all of that said, enjoy your foray into an operating system that really cater to programmers ;)
I'm in the process of making the switch from Windows to Linux right now for a program and so far I have found that man and grep are great. Instead of looking up function prototypes in MSDN (or similar) I just use man.
If I need a code example, greping through an existing project that has some similarities to mine is a great help. Or if there is a project similar enough to warrant this, setting up an LXR of their code-base to more easily facilitate reading really helps a lot.
In general, the open source nature of Linux has been the greatest resource to learning to program on Linux.
Also Stevens' Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment was a huge boon. But as for IDE's and the like, call me a luddite, but I just like vim and make.
I've learned a lot from Beginning Linux Programming by Matthew and Stones, though it's more C than C++.
I use die.net and lookup at The Open Group's website a lot, http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/functions/{function}.html. They have much the same information as man. I use SciTE, and have the C API and The Open Group POSIX lookup as hotkeys, as described here.
This question already has answers here:
What are some good profilers for native C++ on Windows? [closed]
(8 answers)
Closed 9 years ago.
Does windows have any decent sampling (eg. non-instrumenting) profilers available? Preferably something akin to Shark on MacOS, although i am willing to accept that i am going to have to pay for such a profiler on windows.
I've tried the profiler in VS Team Suite and was not overly impressed, and was wondering if there were any other good ones.
[Edit: Erk, i forgot to say this is for C/C++, rather than .NET -- sorry for any confusion]
For Windows, check out the free Xperf that ships with the Windows SDK. It uses sampled profile, has some useful UI, & does not require instrumentation. Quite useful for tracking down performance problems. You can answer questions like:
Who is using the most CPU? Drill down to function name using call stacks.
Who is allocating the most memory?
Outstanding memory allocations (leaks)
Who is doing the most registry queries?
Disk writes? etc.
I know I'm adding my answer months after this question was asked, but I thought I'd point out a decent, open-source profiler: Very Sleepy.
It doesn't have the feature count that some of the other profilers mentioned before do, but it's a pretty respectable sampling profiler that will work very well in most situations.
Intel VTune is good and is non-instrumenting. We evaluated a whole bunch of profilers for Windows, and this was the best for working with driver code (though it does unmanaged user level code as well). A particular strength is that it reads all the Intel processor performance counters, so you can get a good understanding of why your code is running slowly, and it was useful for putting prefetch instructions into our code and sorting out data layout to work well with the cache lines, and the way cache lines get invalidated in multi core systems.
It is commercial, and I have to say it isn't the easiest UI in the world.
AMD's CodeAnalyst is FREE here
We use both VTune and AQTime, and I can vouch for both. Which works best for you depends on your needs. Both have free trial versions - I suggest you give them a go.
The Windows Driver Kit includes a non-instrumenting user/kernel sampling profiler called "kernrate". It seems useful for profiling multi-process applications, applications that spend most of their time in the kernel, and device drivers (of course). It's also available in the KrView (Kernrate Viewer) and Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools packages.
Kernrate works on Windows 2000 and later (unlike Xperf, which requires Vista / Server 2008). It's command-line based and the documentation has a somewhat intimidating list of options. I'm not sure if it can record call stacks or just the program counter. If you use a symbol server, make sure to put an up-to-date dbghelp.dll and symsrv.dll in the same directory as kernrate.exe to prevent it from using the ancient version of dbghelp.dll that is installed in %SystemRoot%\system32.
I have tried Intel's vtune with a rather large project about two years ago. It was an instrumenting profiler then and it took so long to instrument the DLL that I was attempting to profile that I eventually lost patience after an hour.
The one tool that I have had quite good success and which i would highly recommend is that of AQTime. It not only provides excellent performance profiling resources but it also doe really good memory profiling which has been of significant help to me in tracking down memory leaks.
Luke Stackwalker seems promising -- it's not as polished as I'd like, but it is open source and it does do something that seems very close to what #Mike Dunlavey keeps saying we ought to do. (Of course, it then tries to smoosh it all down into the typically-unhelpful call graphs that Mike is so weary of, but it shouldn't be too hard to fix that with the source as our ally.)
It even seems to count time spent waiting in the kernel, as far as I can tell...
I'm not sure what a non-instrumenting profiler is, but I can say for .NET I love RedGate's ANTS Profiler. Version 3 beats the MS version for ease of use and Version 4, which allows arbitrary time slices, makes MS look like a joke.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm looking for a profiler in order to find the bottleneck in my C++ code. I'd like to find a free, non-intrusive, and good profiling tool. I'm a game developer, and I use PIX for Xbox 360 and found it very good, but it's not free. I know the Intel VTune, but it's not free either.
CodeXL has now superseded the End Of Line'd AMD Code Analyst and both are free, but not as advanced as VTune.
There's also Sleepy, which is very simple, but does the job in many cases.
Note: All three of the tools above are unmaintained since several years.
Very Sleepy is a C/C++ CPU profiler for Windows systems (free).
Proffy is quite cool: http://pauldoo.com/proffy/
Disclaimer: I wrote this.
There is an instrumenting (function-accurate) profiler for MS VC 7.1 and higher called MicroProfiler. You can get it here (x64) or here (x86). It doesn't require any modifications or additions to your code and is able of displaying function statistics with callers and callees in real-time without the need of closing application/stopping the profiling process.
It integrates with VisualStudio, so you can easily enable/disable profiling for a project. It is also possible to install it on the clean machine, it only needs the symbol information be located along with the executable being profiled.
This tool is useful when statistical approximation from sampling profilers like Very Sleepy isn't sufficient.
Rough comparison shows, that it beats AQTime (when it is invoked in instrumenting, function-level run). The following program (full optimization, inlining disabled) runs three times faster with micro-profiler displaying results in real-time, than with AQTime simply collecting stats:
void f()
{
srand(time(0));
vector<double> v(300000);
generate_n(v.begin(), v.size(), &random);
sort(v.begin(), v.end());
sort(v.rbegin(), v.rend());
sort(v.begin(), v.end());
sort(v.rbegin(), v.rend());
}
Microsoft has the Windows Performance Toolkit.
It does require Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, or Windows 7.
Another profiler is Shiny.
I highly recommend Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) part of the Windows Performance Toolkit. The command line Windows Performance Recorder (WPR) tool records Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) logs that can be analyzed later using the Windows Performance Analyzer tool. There are some great tutorials on learning how to use the tool.
wpr.exe -start CPU
...
wpr.exe -stop output.etl
wpa.exe output.etl
I use AQTime, it is one of the best profiling tools I've ever used.
It isn't free but you can get a 30 day trial, so if you plan on a optimizing and profiling only one project and 30 days are enough for you then I would recommend using this application. (http://www.automatedqa.com/downloads/aqtime/index.asp)
Please try my profiler, called cRunWatch. It is just two files, so it is easy to integrate with your projects, and requires adding exactly one line to instrument a piece of code.
http://ravenspoint.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/timing/
Requires the Boost library.
I used Luke Stackwalker and it did the job for my Visual Studio project.
Other interesting projects are:
Proffy
Dyninst
I've used "TrueTime - part of Compuware's DevPartner suite for years. There's a [free version](you could try Compuware DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition.) available.
I use VSPerfMon which is the StandAlone Visual Studio Profiler. I wrote a GUI tool to help me run it and look at the results.
http://code.google.com/p/vsptree/
You can use EmbeddedProfiler, it's free for both Linux and Windwos.
The profiler is intrusive (by functionality) but it doens't require any code modifications. Just add a specific compiler flag (-finstrument-functios for gcc/MinGW or /GH for MSVC) and link the profiler's library. It can provide you a full call tree or just a funciton list. It has it's own analyzer GUI.