ZJDBGPack 2.0 improved “batch-ability”
An improved version of ZJDBGPack has been released, with better error messages and non-zero exit codes when an error occurs. This makes it more usable for batches and automated builds.
SamplingProfiler v1.7.3 bug fix
SamplingProfiler v1.7.3 has now been released and should be used in place of 1.7.2 which was pulled.
1.7.2 had a nasty bug in the timings statistics (promptly spotted by Robert Houdart) which should be fixed in 1.7.3, there are no other changes and additions in this version.
SamplingProfiler v1.7.2
SamplingProfiler v1.7.2 has now been released.
This version includes the following changes:
- added an option to display line numbers in the source preview
- extended the process CPU affinity options to allow individually selecting up to 16 cores
The UI has been slightly rearrange to accomodate the CPU affinity options (I guess I’ll need to find something prettier for those upcoming 256 core CPUs…). There may be other indirect minor changes.
Printable versions of the articles
There is something about WordPress that reminds me of Delphi, not the language or the IDE, but the spirit. On the one hand, its a convenient and comfortable environment out of the box, to which ready-made functionality can be easily added, and on the other hand everything under the hood is still accessible and tweakable without having to fork in a major way (like Delphi, unlike most of the rest of them).
Anyway, I’ve added support for printable versions of the articles here, thanks to Lester Chan’s WP-Print, a wee bit of CSS & php tweaking is all it took. Hopefully the dead-tree lovers that asked for it should be satisfied, as well as those few that manually tried to append a “/print” to the url 😉
ZJDBGPack re-release
ZJDBGPack is again available, but as an independent download (it used to be bundled with SamplingProfiler).
This is a command-line utility intended for use in a build process or from the Delphi tools menu, whose purpose is to integrate debug information into an executable. The debug information format is a compressed version of JCL‘s JDBG.
As of know, SamplingProfiler is the only published utility that understands this format, so you can use it either to reduce the size of the executables you deploy for profiling purposes, or if you do not want to deploy directly-readable debug information files.
SamplingProfiler v1.7.1 bugfix release
SamplingProfiler v1.7.1 is now available, it fixes the crash in the paths dialog reported by Kazan in the forums.
Incidentally this was due to a very old Delphi 5 bit of code that somehow survived Delphi 2009 at the compilation level, but bombed at runtime… I dropped the code and made use of the already existing D2009 version, hence the smaller executable.
For further details on this version, see the v1.7.0 post.
SamplingProfiler 1.7.0 still hot from the compiler
SamplingProfiler v1.7.0 is now available, you can get the zip and release details from its changelog page.
As announced last week, the changes are a fix for a bug that could drastically affect the execution speed of the profiled application when relying on MAP files for debug information, if you were hit by this bug, things should be like night and day with this version (and hopefully I didn’t break anything else in the process…).
MapFileStats v1.2 out and other news
MapFileStats v1.2 is now available for download, it fixes reported issues and introduces a few minor improvements, such as using the ability to abort search paths scans and remembering MAP File and Search Paths options between executions. You can find the complete list in the changelog.
Delphi 2009 hidden compiler switch?
This morning while debugging a statistical ichthyo-parser I stumbled upon what looked like a Delphi 2009 compiler bug: the compiler was outputting gibberish ASM opcodes… But after further investigations, it appeared this wasn’t completely gibberish, but that it was (somewhat) correct MSIL bytecode!
How familiar are you with code profiling?
SamplingProfiler was initially released in the Delphi ASM newsgroup, and I’m curious about the audience of this website, so I’ve setup a small poll.
How familiar are you with code profiling and/or Delphi code optimization? Can you tell apart instrumenting and sampling profilers merely by their respective heisenbugs, or is that profiler business sounding like a TV series from the last century?