(Courtesy djw@avantgo.com)
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mcafee
had this close to compiling on Solaris 2.5.1 on 7 October 1998.
The changes djw made to the xfe will have to be reapplied to NGLayout. |
So you want to know why something is slow?
Want to know what the !#@#$!! thing is doing?
Read on...
I've just checked in a relatively easy to use gmon/gprof based profiler into the tree. You can start the profiler, stop the profiler, reset the profiler, etc... right from your very own browser, or editor, or mail/news,...... (there is a menu based interface to the profiler under the Help menu). The best part is you can get a HTML profile report printed into your browser! I've attached a sample. It's the top 100 functions that are exercised during startup.
The report shows the time spent in each function, sorted from highest to lowest. It also shows the executation "arcs" - foo called bar called zoo, and we did this 30% of the time.
I'll be writing up more detailed info, but for now, if you want to try it:
- Get you to a Sun box (sorry, this stuff is extremely platform specific, SGI coming).
- Pull a tree, or update, whatever (my changes are in cmd/xfe and cmd/xfe/src).
- Set MOZILLA_GPROF in your environment or myconfig.mk
- Rebuild everything (MOZILLA_GPROF sets a special compile option)
- Preferably build netscape-export
- Run and enjoy (hint: look under the Help menu).
- Check out the (somewhat dry) man page for gprof(1), it'll help interpret the report.
With the profiler running there is slight performance slowdown (maybe 5-10%).
By default, the profiler is running at startup. You can set the initial state to off using:
-
setenv MOZILLA_GPROF "running=false"
An optimized build (with DEBUG not set) will give you the most accurate data, but you can build MOZILLA_GPROF and -g just fine. It'll run just a little slower.
mcafee@netscape.com