A hard challenge anyone?

[Richard Gaskin]

David Bovill wrote:
> On 15/02/07, Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:
>> > How would the profiler fit in - I didn't even think the thing worked :)
>> Profiling wouldn't be part of a code base reporter per se, but it's a
>> great way to identify runtime bottlenecks.
>>
>> MC's works, but its UI is ugly and it's painfully slow.  Jacque tells me
>> there's a way to speed it up in one line, but alas I haven't had the
>> time to dig into it.
> 
> OK - I think I am got the wrong end of this. I was thinking of property
> profiles - from your and Jacques reply it seems like we are talking about
> something much more interesting what does the MC profiler actually do /
> generate?

Yeah, I never felt "profile" was the best term for Rev's property sets, 
but I have to admit I haven't thought of a better one.

Code profiling is a way of obtaining performance measurements.  In MC, 
it shows the number of times each handler in a script was called, and 
the total amount of time spent in that handler.

Because it takes up so much time on its own, the times shown are best 
used for relative measurements.  But even that has been useful to me in 
showing me where time gets spent, and where I need to optimize.

The number of times a handler has been called can be useful too, esp. if 
your code is complex and it's not immediately self-evident what gets 
called when.  I'll admit that I've had two cases where I had handlers 
called redundantly, and the profiler helped me spot those right away.

Conceivably, MC's profiler could be extracted and used in any IDE. It's 
just a question of getting the time to do that.....

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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