GNOME's Sysprof Adds FlameGraphs To Better Visualize Output

[stormcrow]

I thought there was ksysprof?

I think you mean "kcachegrind", a KDE frontend for visualizing valgrind & oprofile dumps. AFIAK, there's no such thing as "ksysprof". There's a "ksysmon" but that's more akin to Window's taskmgr. Assuming we're speaking about kcachegrind... it's not as good (to me) because the way it shows value visualizations is in block map format. It's like a flame map viewed from above looking straight down. With a vertical flame graph you can see what the stack profile looks like at a glance stretched out in two dimensions, with a block map you have everything overlapping each other because one dimension stacks towards you.

[Digital Spaceport]

Author of Sysprof here.

You can get a Nightly flatpak of Sysprof from GNOME's nightly repository. It still requires that you have sysprofd on the host, but most distributions have that already. I was careful to keep it working with older versions of the "host profiler daemon".

The only caveat here is that when running the Sysprof UI from Flatpak, it can be fairly annoying to resolve symbols on the host, and we do our best to model the mount namespace of recorded processes, our own process, and the host to crack open the right ELF to symbolize. Operating systems which build with frame pointers are certainly going to yield better results.

GNOME OS nightly's in developer mode also bundle Sysprof.

That said, there are *plenty* of great tools in KDE which Sysprof takes inspiration from. Our malloc tracer works very similar to KDE's heaptrack under the hood.
Hotspot and kcachegrind are also great tools.

I think the most valuable thing on my mind while creating Sysprof was "how do I get all this information in one place" so I'm not constantly jumping between tools trying to correlate information.

Thank you for this! I love it when something new pops up that I didnt know I couldnt live without.

[creative]

elduderino

I'm actually not a developer at the moment but am currently learning a glut of new things. I was fascinated by seeing how everything is linked and to what, it struck me as a diagnostic tool, yet I did no know that its main aim was at developers which hilariously is quite obviously the case. I had to boot into Artix to actually check out sysprof which was not installed by default, when it came to zooming in on graphs I could only zoom so far before the application would crash, didn't grab the flatpak cause of this. Sysprof is not easily accessible on Slackware but I know if I dedicated time I could get a lot of things properly built for it, Slackware for the most part is degnomed, I still have a lot of things from gnome installed like gvfs, gnome-disk-utility, and of older GNOME based software.

To my chagrin I was fascinated by it in the same way as I am with Xaos and Mandebulber, yet seeing how processes and from where and how they were linked and shown in graph. I wish not to waste your time.

What you have there is an incredible project.

[Vorpal]

Probably the most intelligent thing to do if I want to try this out is to get a GNOME based desktop distribution and fire it up in a vm so I'm not cluttering my box.

I'm om Arch, and I found a wonderful tool called asysconf that can record current system state (to a set of she'll scripts) and also apply that recorded config. It is a bit like configuration management (ansible and similar) but actually sensible and useful. Being able to save the current system makes all the difference.

That allows you to easily uninstall packages afterwards. Now, config in your home dir is a different matter. I recommend chezmoi for that.

[creative]

Vorpal

Thanks, as small as my Artix install is right now I'd most likely just use kbackup. Even then getting up a working installation from command line can be done very quickly if I seriously borked stuff. Artix is basically just my auxiliary fallback from my daily driver.

Definitely some considerations to check into though.