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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CodeXL has now superseded the End Of Line'd AMD Code Analyst and both are free, but not as advanced as VTune.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.
Related
is there an IDE or perhaps a piece of software that could time my C++ programs? I'm currently using Visual Studio 2010 so if there's a functionality to help with that, I'd appreciate it.
You will want to use a Profiler. There are plenty of options out there, but start with what you have natively in VS - please read Find Application Bottlenecks with Visual Studio Profiler
Taken from here
Determining the speed of a particular
operation is often known as profiling.
The term "profiling" can also be used
when other information about an
operation's profile is queried -- such
as the number of calls to a function.
And, as always, MSDN is your friend with Analyzing Application Performance by Using Profiling Tools
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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
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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
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What are some good profilers for native C++ on Windows? [closed]
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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.
What good profilers do you know?
What is a good way to measure and tweak the performance of a C++ MFC application?
Is Analysis of algorithms really neccesary? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm_analysis
I strongly recommend AQTime if you are staying on the Windows platform. It comes with a load of profilers, including static code analysis, and works with most important Windows compilers and systems, including Visual C++, .NET, Delphi, Borland C++, Intel C++ and even gcc. And it integrates into Visual Studio, but can also be used standalone. I love it.
If you're (still) using Visual C++ 6.0, I suggest using the built-in profiler. For more recent versions you could try Compuware DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition.
For Windows, check out Xperf which ships free 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?
Who is doing the most registry queries?
Disk writes? etc.
You will be quite surprised when you find the bottlenecks, as they are probably not where you expected!
It's been a while since I profiled unmanaged code, but when I did I had good results with Intel's vtune. I'm sure somebody else will tell us if that's been overtaken.
Algorithmic analysis has the potential to improve your performance more profoundly than anything you'll find with a profiler, but only for certain classes of application. If you operate over reasonably large sets of data, algorithmic analysis might find ways to be more efficient in CPU/Memory/both, but if your app is mainly form-fill with a relational database for storage, it might not offer you much.
Intel Thread Checker via Vtune performance analyzer- Check this picture for the view i use the most that tells me which function eats up the most of my time.
I can further drill down inside and decompose which functions inside them eats up more time etc. There are different views based on what you are watching (total time = time within fn + children), self time (time spent only in code running inside the function etc).
This tool does a lot more than profiling but i haven't explored them all. I would definitely recommend it. The tool is also available for downloading as a fully functional trial version that can run for 30 days. If you have cost constraints, i would say this window is all that you require to pin point your problem.
Trial download here - https://registrationcenter.intel.com/RegCenter/AutoGen.aspx?ProductID=907&AccountID=&ProgramID=&RequestDt=&rm=EVAL&lang=
ps : I have also played with Rational Rational but for some reason I did not take much to it. I suspect Rational might be more expensive than Intel too.
Tools (like true time from DevPartner) that let you see hit counts for source lines let you quickly find algorithms that have bad 'Big O' complexity. You still have to analyse the algorithm to determine how to reduce the complexity.
I second AQTime, having both AQTime and Compuwares DevPartner, for most cases. The reason being that AQTime will profile any executable that has a valid PDB file, whereas TrueTime requires you to make an instrumented build. This greatly speeds up and simplifies ad hoc profiling. DevPartner is also quite a bit more expensive if this is an issue. Where DevPartner comes into its own is with BoundsChecker, which I still rate as a better tool for catching leaks and overwrites than AQTimes execution profiler. TrueTime can be slighly more accurate than AQTime, but I have never found this to be an issue.
Is profiling worthwhile, IMO yes, if you need performance gains on a local application. I think you also learn a lot about how your program and algorithms really work, and the cost implications of using certain types of object classes for storing and iterating through your data.
Glowcode is a very nice profiler (when it works). It can attach to a running program and requires only symbol files - you don't need to rebuild.
Some versions pf visual studio 2005 (and maybe 2008) actually come with a pretty good performance profiler.
if you have it it should be available under the tools menu
or you can search for a way to open the "performance explorer" window to start a new performance session.
A link to MSDN
FYI, Some versions of Visual Studio only come with a non-optimizing compiler. For one of my my MFC apps if I compile it with MINGW/MSYS ( gcc compiler ) with -o3 then it runs about 5-10x as fast as my release compile with Visual Studio.
For example I have an openstreetmap xml compiler and it takes about 3 minutes ( the gcc compiled version) to process a 2.7GB xml file. My visual studio compile of the same code takes about 18 minutes to run.