Massif Visualizer - Ready for Testers and Feedback!

memory consumption overview

Hello everyone!

In my opinion, the massif visualizer is ready for testing. I bet there are still a few rough edges, but the most important features are in. So if you are going to do any memory profiling these days, please take a look at my tool and give me feedback. I’d be especially interested in whether the massif visualizer helps in the work flow to analyze massif data files.

My personal work flow so far is the following:

callgraph of detailed massif snapshot

generate massif log, one way or the other (unit tests preferred since they give you reproducible test cases) open log in massif-visualizer, look at overall consumption chart 1. how does the memory consumption evolve? is there a memleak? 2. are there designated peaks which could be reduced? 3. are there any (significant) contributions to the memory consumption, that needlessly stay over the whole application life? to find the actual culprits in code and/or to grasp the composition of a memory peak, use the detailed snapshot analysis

I wonder how I could improve the tool to also help with verifying that a fix helps, e.g. by either overlaying two charts or by only showing the difference. The problem here is of course that it would only work with reproducible test cases and that it needs interpolation since the snapshots are taken at random points in time. Still, it would be nice to open two massif logs and seeing the impact on memory consumption of a patch visually.

Note: To anyone interested: I generate the callgraphs by converting the massif snapshot trees into a graphviz DOT file. That one I than visualize with KGraphViewer KPart. Since KGraphViewer was in no shape to visualize the huge amount of data in my use case, I had to optimize it greatly and push in some more features to make it better suitable for thirdparty users. To integrate it better, I had to write a public interface, which also means that you need KGraphViewer installed from source to be able to compile Massif Visualizer (I’ll make it optional later on). Hence get the sources from here (packages by your distributor won’t be enough): http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/extragear/graphics/kgraphviewer/