Building profiling support into the code

Question

I wish (I dont know if its possible) to build profiling support into my code instead of using some external profiler. I have heard that there is some profiler api that is used by most of the profiler writers. Can that api be used to profile from within the code that is being executed? Are there any other considerations?

Answer 1

If you don't want to use a regular profiler, you could have your application output performance counters.

You may find this blog entry useful to get started: http://geekswithblogs.net/.NETonMyMind/archive/2006/08/20/88549.aspx

Answer 2

The .NET framework profiler API is a COM object that intercepts calls before .NET handles them. My understanding is that it cannot be hosted in managed (C#) code.

Depending on what you want to do, you can insert Stopwatch timers to measure length of calls, or add Performance Counters to your application so that you can monitor the performance of the application from the Performance Monitor.

Answer 3

There's a GameDev article that discusses how to build profiling infrastructure in a C++ program. You may be able to adapt this approach to work with C# provided objects created on the stack are freed on exit instead of left for the garbage collector

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/enginuity3/

Even if you can't take the whole technique, there may be some useful ideas.

Answer 4

What I've done when I can't use my favorite technique is this. It's clumsy and gives low-resolution information, but it works. First, have a global stack of strings. This is in C, but you can adapt it to C#:

int nStack = 0;
char* stack[10000];

Then, on entry and exit to each routine you have source code for, push/pop the name of the routine:

void EveryFunction(){
    int iStack = nStack++; stack[iStack] = "EveryFunction";

    ... code inside function

    nStack = iStack; stack[iStack] = NULL;
}

So now stack[0..nStack] keeps a running call stack (minus the line numbers of where functions are called from), so it's not as good as a real call stack, but better than nothing.

Now you need a way to take snapshots of it at random or pseudo-random times. Have another global variable and a routine to look at it:

time_t timeToSnap;
void CheckForSnap(){
    time_t now = time(NULL);
    if (now >= timeToSnap){
        if (now - timeToSnap > 10000) timeToSnap = now; // don't take snaps since 1970
        timeToSnap += 1; // setup time for next snapshot
        // print stack to snapshot file
    }
}

Now, sprinkle calls to CheckForSnap throughout your code, especially in the low-level routines. When the run is finished, you have a file of stack samples. You can look at those for unexpected behavior. For example, any function showing up on a significant fraction of samples has inclusive time roughly equal to that fraction.

Like I said, this is better than nothing. It does have shortcomings:

• It does not capture line-numbers where calls come from, so if you find a function with suspiciously large time, you need to rummage within it for the time-consuming code.
• It adds significant overhead of it's own, namely all the calls to time(NULL), so when you have removed all your big problems, it will be harder to find the small ones.
• If your program spends significant time waiting for I/O or for user input, you will see a bunch of samples piled up after that I/O. If it's file I/O, that's useful information, but if it's user input, you will have to discard those samples, because all they say is that you take time.

It is important to understand a few things:

• Contrary to popular accepted wisdom, accuracy of time measurement (and thus a large number of samples) is not important. What is important is that samples occur during the time when you are waiting for the program to do its work.
• Also contrary to accepted wisdom, you are not looking for a call graph, you don't need to care about recursion, you don't need to care about how many milliseconds any routine takes or how many times it is called, and you don't need to care about the distinction between inclusive and exclusive time, or the distinction between CPU and wall-clock time. What you do need to care about is, for any routine, what percent of time it is on the stack, because that is how much time it is responsible for, in the sense that if you could somehow make that routine take no time, that is how much your total time would decrease.

Answer 5

The EQATEC Profiler builds an instrumented version of your app that will run and collect profiling statistics entirely by itself - you don't need to attach the profiler. By default your app will simply dump the statistics into plaintext xml-files.

This means that you can build a profiled version of your app, deploy it at your customer's site, and have them run it and send back the statistics-reports to you. No need for them to install anything special or run a profiler or anything.

Also, if you can reach your deployed app's machine via a network-connection and it allows incoming connections then you can even take snapshots of the running profiled app yourself, sitting at home with the profiler. All you need is a socket-connection - you decide the port-number yourself and the control-protocol itself is plain http, so it's pretty likely to make it past even content-filtering gateways.