I still think we should find a way to integrate the two somehow - i.e. analyze locally and then send the pre-analyzed data for visualization purposes to the remote firefox profiler. Does anyone know a good format we could use for that purpose? It needs to be non-verbose to not hit the infamous 2GB/4GB JSON heap size limitation on import e.g. Similarly, we also need something that can deal with the various cost types we support in hotspot, most notably off-CPU time.
And to people using other IDE/editors - you can configure which one gets opened when you click on a source line from the hotspot settings. QtCreator is just the default (when that is installed).
It's a pity, Hotspot is abandoned in Debian. Just because of policykit [1]. The package seems to be rather easy to maintain (it has a tiny rule file, small control and only 2 patches).
I think, firstly, that spending 15s trying the CTRL-c approach is a worthwhile tradeoff. If you don't find anything, then sure, spend another 30m - 60m setting up perf, KDAB, etc. Maybe more if you're on an embedded device.
Secondly, the author seems to say that he's used this on embedded devices with no output but a serial line for the debugger. This is also a 15s effort[1].
It's basically a very low effort task, takes seconds to determine if it worked or not, and if it doesn't work you've only lost a few seconds.
[1] I'm assuming that if you're developing on a device supporting a serial GDB connection, you've already got the debugger working.
perf is easily available through yocto and buildroot (and probably other embedded linux image builders). hotspot can be downloaded as an appimage. It should not take 30-60min to set this up, but granted, learning the tools the first time always has some cost.
Furthermore, note how your reasoning is quite different from what the website you linked to says - it basically says "there are no good tools" (which is untrue) whereas you are saying "manual GDB sampling might be good enough and is easier to setup than a good tool" (which is certainly true).
True, that's another good point. But again, this reasoning is very different to the one from the linked article and website - if you have oprofile or valgrind's cachegrind available, you clearly could get perf setup instead.
I'm not debating that manual GDB sampling has its place and value. I'm debating that perf is "lying" or that it's impossible to get hold of off-CPU samples, or profiling of multithreaded code in general.
kreinin spends a lot of time debugging things that don't run on linux or any cpu architecture linux or vtune supports. even on amd64 linux, perf is not so useful with python, lua, node.js, browser js, shell scripts, etc.
I don't know exactly what these BSD things did, but there is a super easy way nowadays to get the stack for any process:
eu-stack -i -p $(pidof ...)
Thanks to debuginfod this will even give you good backtraces right away (at the cost of some initial delay to load the data from the web, consecutive runs are fast). If you get a "permission denied" error, you probably need to tweak kernel.yama.ptrace_scope=0
the bsd things still work; you can install a bsd in qemu or a spare laptop and try them
from your reference to kernel.yama.ptrace_scope (and your apparent belief that bsd belongs to the distant past) i infer that eu-stack is a linux thing? this looks pretty awesome, thanks for the tip!
Sad to see people are still unaware of modern perf profilers like hotspot, tracy, vtune, ...
they are easy to setup, work extremely efficient and can nowadays also catch off-cpu time. ctrl+c debugging finds you trivial stuff, but dismissing the real tools as unusable or inferior is simply ignorant.
> Unlike perf, gdb will give you a callstack even if the program was compiled without frame pointer support.
There is `--call-graph dwarf` and it exists since many years, and with `-z` it is pretty efficient and just works too - unless the stack gets too long, but even then it's good enough for profiling purposes...
> Also, sampling profilers are bad at tail latency - if something is usually fast but occasionally slow, you won’t be there to Ctrl-C it when it’s slow.
Very true, thankfully the flight recorder modes for profilers can help with that to a certain degree, with a potentially large sampling frequency.
