Based on some initial work by Barnabás Pőcze Sysprof gained support for symbolizing stack traces using debuginfod. If you don’t want to install debuginfo packages for your entire system but still want really useful function names, this is for you. The system-configured debuginfod servers will provide you access to those debuginfo-enabled ELF binaries so that … Continue reading debuginfod-enabled Sysprof
A long requested feature for Sysprof (and most profiler tools in general) is support for visualizing data as FlameGraphs. They are essentially a different view on the same callgraph data we already generate. So yesterday afternoon I spent a bit of time prototyping them to sneak into GNOME 45. Many tools out there use the … Continue reading Flamegraphs for Sysprof
GWeather Last time I wrote we talked about a new search index for libgweather. In the end I decided to take another route so that we can improve application performance without any changes. Instead, I added a kdtree to do nearest neighbor search when deserializing GWeatherLocation. That code path was looking for the nearest city … Continue reading More Sysprof’ing
Every once in a while I take a moment to test GNOME OS on physical hardware. The experience today was quite a bit underwhelming. Fresh install, type a few characters into the search box, and things grind to a halt. Being the system profiler author I am, where would I consider spending time to make … Continue reading How to use Sysprof (again)
Unfortunately I couldn’t be at GUADEC this year, but that wont stop me from demoing new things! I’ve been doing a lot of work on Sysprof now that we have semi-reliable frame unwinding on Fedora, Silverblue and GNOME OS. When I have tolling that works on the OS it makes it a lot easier to … Continue reading Sysprof 45
With the advent of immutable/re-provisional/read-only operating systems like Fedora’s Silverblue, people will be doing a lot more computing inside of containers on their desktops (as if they’re not already). When you want to profile an entire system with tools like perf this can be problematic because the files that are mapped into memory could be … Continue reading Sysprof and Podman
In the previous article of this series we covered Sysprof basics to help you use the tooling. Now I want to take a moment to show you how to use the command line tooling to profile systems like GNOME Shell. Record an existing session The easiest way to get started is to record your existing … Continue reading How to use Sysprof to… Part II
First off, before using Sysprof to improve the performance of a particular piece of software, make sure you’re compiling with flags that allow us to have enough information to unwind stack frames. Sysprof will use libunwind in some cases, but a majority of our stack unwinding is done by the Linux kernel which can currently … Continue reading How to use Sysprof to…
I just uploaded the sysprof-3.33.4 tarball as we progress towards 3.34. This alpha release has some interesting new features that some of you may find interesting as you continue your quests to improve the performance of your system by improving the software running upon it. For a while, I’ve been wondering about various ways to … Continue reading Sysprof Updates
Since my last post, I’ve been working on a redesign of Sysprof (among other things) to make it a bit more useful and friendly to newcomers. Many years ago, I worked on a small profiler project called “Perfkit” that never really went anywhere. I had already done most of my UI research for this years … Continue reading Sysprof design work