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 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…).

(more…)

begin…end as bottlenecks?

There will come a time when SamplingProfiler may report you that begin or end are your bottlenecks. This may sound a little surprising, but it’s actually quite a common occurrence, and something that instrumenting profilers are not going to point out, so it might be worth a little explanation.

(more…)

Website getting up to speed

I’ve reorganized the site a bit since the relocation, tweaked WordPress behind the scenes, added OpenID support for comments and hopefully sorted out the over-aggressive spam filter.

The support forums are no longer available now also hosted here, no OpenID support for them just yet, but I’ll enable it as soon as it’s out of beta. For bug reports and features/suggestions, the forums are the place to post (easier to track things).

There will likely be a new SamplingProfiler release in the next days, which will add support for CPU-usage-based sampling, ie. profiling only takes place when the CPU usage goes above above a treshold (either at the system or the process level).

Saving results & merging

SamplingProfiler run results can be saved to .spr files (Sampling Profiler Results) and later reused for comparison purposes, or for merging, one of the less obvious features of the profiler.
You can merge results by right-clicking on a results tab and selecting… “Merge results”, oddly enough. After this, the samples will be aggregated across the runs you selected, hopefully providing more statistical accuracy.

(more…)