ProTest - Delphi profiler test utility

ProfiTest - profiler tester (Delphi version)

Why writing a profiler tester? Does that make sense at all?

Every profiler tries to deliver accurate results. With the profiler tester you can find out, if a profiler can handle the basic problems:

Measure procedures with a few instructions only
Measure nested routines
Handle idle times
Give results for functions processing micro- or nano seconds only: Important if such functions are called very often.

Another reason for the existence of this tester is, that different principles of profiling exist:

Source instrumenting,
machine code instrumenting and
sampling profilers.

The tester will show that sampling profilers deliver more or less random results. Also it will show that some profilers do not have a sufficient granularity.

Some profilers can not handle idle times. To give an example:

A program waits in a loop where ProcessMessage is called due to waiting for an external event. Certainly nobody wants to know, how long the program waits. As a consequence the cyles processed while waiting should not be counted. Other events which are processed while waiting have to be counted, but not as child times of the waiting procedure. Some profilers do not have this feature.

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Last page update: 7/25/2010