Profiling support

Information

MonoDevelop.Profiling is an add-on that adds profiling support to MonoDevelop. Using this add-on, developers can measure the performance, memory usage, ... of their application.

Installation

The profiler addin now ships together with the MonoDevelop source code (as of 2007-12-20)

* cd <md-source-code>/extras/MonoDevelop.Profiling
* sh autogen.sh --prefix=...
* make
* make install

Or add the line "extras/MonoDevelop.Profiling" to the profile that you use to build MonoDevelop.

Requirements

* An up-to-date svn version (or MonoDevelop 1.0 when it's released)
* HeapShot (http://www.mono-project.com/HeapShot) or HeapBuddy (http://www.mono-project.com/HeapBuddy)
* mono 1.2.3 (lower version could work, but never tested)

Usage

Currently, there are 2 ways how you can use the profiling addin:

Profile a project

• Load a MonoDevelop solution
• Go to the "Project" menu
• Select "Run profiled"
• Choose on of the profilers
• Let your application run for a while ...
• Click on "Take Profiling Snapshot" button in the toolbar of the profiling pad (if this pad isn't visible, go to "View">"Profiling Snapshots"
• Save the snapshot

Profile a process

• Start a process with a profiler (eg: mono --profile=heap-shot MyApp.exe)
• Let your application run for a while ...
• Go to the "Tools" menu and select "Profile Process"
• Select a process (only processes that are created with a profiler are shown)
• Click on "Take Profiling Snapshot" button in the toolbar of the profiling pad (if this pad isn't visible, go to "View">"Profiling Snapshots"
• Save the snapshot

HeapBuddy remark

HeapBuddy expects that the process exits nicely, when trying to force heap-buddy to create a profiling snapshot, this might result into data loss. So whenever you are using heap-buddy, terminate the application cleanly like you would always do. (don't worry though, MonoDevelop will warn you when needed)

Screenshots