Basic Operation

Start profiling

Select it in the "Application Name" field, then launch it by using the "Start Profiling" button. Do whatever you want to do in the application, and when you're done, close it. Profiling information will be available as soon as the profiled application has terminated.

Note that in this version of SamplingProfiler, sampling information is collected only for the application's main thread.

You can add SamplingProfiler in your Delphi tools menu, if you specify $EXENAME as parameter, it will then open with the current Delphi project already selected (and reload its settings if you saved them in a prior session).

Detailed Profiling Information

To obtain detailed profiling information, you must provide SamplingProfiler with application debug information data, which can currently be either:

• TD32 information: these can be included by checking the corresponding box in the Delphi linker properties. TD32 information will make your executable (much) larger.
• ZJDBG file: a compression version of the JDBG file, even smaller and that cannot be accessed by published JCL source. Generate it from a MAP file with the "Tools" menu.
• JDBG file: this can be compiled from the MAP file by using the "Tools" menu or JCL's "MapToJdbg" utility. This file is about 12% of the size of the MAP file.
• MAP file: this one can be generated by selecting the "detailed" map file option in the linker, this will generate a rather large file alongside your executable (but your executable remains at a normal size).

(Z)JDBG debug information can be embedded into an executable.

SamplingProfiler will automatically look for these three sources of information, and use the first one it finds and that is up to date (when selecting the executable in the interface, it will tell you which it found, or did not find for that matter).

To obtain code-line-level information about RTL/VCL calls, you will also have to enable "Debug DCUs" in the compiler options (if you use BPLs however, no details will be available as Borland/Embarcadero did not provide debug information for these).

In the project tab, select the Delphi version used to compile the application if you want SamplingProfiler to be able to show you the source code associated to profiling hot-spots and bottlenecks.

Source Files Paths

Source files will be looked for in several groups of directories (by decreasing priority):

• Application's path and its subdirectories (if the option is checked)
• Delphi's Search & Browse paths (of the Delphi version selected)
• Custom Source Files Search paths (these are stored with the project)
• Global Source Files Search paths (defined in the Options menu)

First file encountered whose names matches will be the one displayed.

Saving Profiling Runs Results

Profiling runs results can be saved to '.spr' files for future analysis. The SPR files contain all the profiling results information, and therefore can be viewed without having access to the executable or any debug information, you'll need coherent source files for the source preview.

You can manually merge several results file into one by choosing "Merge Results" from the results tab pop-up menu, and then selecting the files you want to merge in. Note that this merge operation allows to merge results from completely unrelated runs, executable or builds, sampling data is merged according to unit, procedure/class and line numbers only, so what may or may not make any sense after a merge is entirely left to the user's appreciation.

It is possible to export profiling results as an .xml file, rather than the native .spr format, allowing any kind of custom analysis on the profiling run results. Note however that the resulting xml file can be much, much larger than the .spr.

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