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	TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction The Upside of Macros The Tool Checking Memory Operators

Oguz Kupusoglu is a software engineer. He can be contacted at oguz.kupusoglu@gmail.com.

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Profiling an application is necessary when you want to learn more about how it runs and where its bottlenecks are. A profiler is an analysis tool, which tracks the application while it is being executed. Although the capabilities of the profilers vary, graphically displaying the call cost and hit count--the average time elapsed in milliseconds for a function call, and the number of times a function is called, respectively-- are the most essential features profiling tools should have.

I use Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 Professional Edition on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Although this compiler has a profiler, it is a bit cumbersome. Moreover, analyzing the profiler data is not easy. Microsoft has provided the PROFILER.XLM macro to analyze the profiler data. However, I think it is also difficult to use. Consequently, I decided to develop my own simple profiler. The complete source code (and related files) for the profiler is available online.

My primary design goals are:

• Ease of use. Developers should not need to learn many things on the profiler. It should be as simple as possible. The profiler should be able to profile multithreaded applications.
• Charts. The call cost and hit count charts should be generated.
• Averaging. Statistically, it is desirable to collect as much profiler data as possible and then take an average of them.

I decided to develop a class to collect the profiler data and a tool to analyze them graphically with Microsoft Excel (I tested the tool with Microsoft Excel 2000 and Microsoft Excel 2003.) Obviously, I am not after precise measurements; I simply want to compare some numeric data. The CProfiler class is aimed at function level profiling; it doesn't provide any data on line level.

The tool is tightly coupled to Microsoft Excel. However, I developed the CProfiler class with portably in mind; the SData struct is a wrapper for any specific implementation.

CProfiler Class

Listing One shows this class. Note the static functions and data members.

struct SData;
    class CProfiler
    {
        public:
            CProfiler(wchar_t* pId);
            CProfiler(void* pAddress, wchar_t* pType, wchar_t* pOp, wchar_t* pId);
            ~CProfiler();
            bool InitInstance();
            void StopInstance();
            static void InitClass(wchar_t* pDir, bool profiling);
            static void StopClass();
            static void DeleteTemps();
            static void ProcessData();
        private:
            static bool IsDirOK(wchar_t* pDir);
            SData*                       m_start;
            FILE*                        m_file;
            bool                         m_failed;
            wchar_t*                     m_pId;
            static SData*                s_frequency;
            static wchar_t               s_dir[LEN_BUFFER];
            static bool                  s_profiling;
            static bool                  s_failed;
            static bool                  s_stopped;
            static std::map   s_files;
            static void*                 s_mutex;
    };

To simplify the usage, I developed the macros in Listing Two.

#define PROFILER_INITCLASS(dir)                 CProfiler::InitClass(L##dir, true)
#define PROFILER_INITCLASS_CURRDIR              CProfiler::InitClass(0, true)
#define PROFILER_PROCESSDATA                    CProfiler::ProcessData()
#define PROFILER_START(id)                      CProfiler profiler(L##id)
#define PROFILER_STOP                           profiler.StopInstance()

1 Introduction | 2 The Upside of Macros | 3 The Tool | 4 Checking Memory Operators Next Page

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