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The purpose of your software is to serve your end-users well.
It must be fast, responsive, easy to use, and reliable, among other desirable functionalities.
But maintaining your software in a manner that keeps on delivering top-level performance is not that easy.
Your app could become sluggish, unresponsive, or behave erratically.
And if you do not fix these issues, the overall utility performance is suffered.
It not only degrades your reputation but also costs you in terms of revenue and profits.
Therefore, your code needs to be analyzed, reviewed, and debugged to achieve optimal performance.
In this article, youll learn about software profiling and how it can help you.
What is Software Profiling?
There are also specific profilers available, like memory profilers.
Profiling is generally performed by instrumenting the programs source code.
Profilers can use different techniques of profiling such as instrumented, event-based, statistical, or simulation methods.
Why Does Software Profiling Matter?
Software profiling is needed to determine the resource usage and execution time associated with a specific function.
It helps optimize the programs speed and, at the same time, ensure that it consumes minimal resources.
Furthermore, it is done to track and optimize CPU usage and command execution time.
py-spy
py-spyis an excellent sampling profiler for Python.
This allows you to get a sneak peek at all the things your Python-based tool spends time on.
For this, you dont have to modify your codes or restart the program altogether.
py-spy involves low overhead and is developed in Rust to execute greater speed.
It is not built to operate in the same process where your profiled python-based program runs.
This implies that py-spy is highly safe and secure to use against the production Python-based codes.
The tool enables you to record profiles, generate flame graphs to create interactive SVG files.
Bubbleprof
Bubbleprofby Clinic.js provides a fresh and unique way of profiling your software written in Node.js.
It uses a bubble UI that helps everyone from experts to beginners determine asynchronous time spent in your app.
It also clubs the adjacent groups to decrease clutter.
In addition to this, it uses different colors in the measurement processes as well.
Simultaneously, the inner colored lines represent a mixture of async operation types as the cause of delay.
Pyinstrument
Optimize your Python codes withPyinstrument.
It also comes with a Python API that makes the process even easier.
It is advantageous as statistical profilers involve lower overhead compared to tracing profilers.
As it records the whole stack, tracking expensive function calls becomes effortless.
Debugging performance issues is made easier because Pyinstrument records time spent using wall-clock time.
This is done to track the errors.
To help a developer understand things clearly, it generates color-coded information along with structured views.
SPX
Simple Profiling eXtension (SPX) is a profiling extension designed for PHP.
It has some unique properties, setting it apart from other profiling extensions.
As a result, you dont have to instrument your code manually.
It also supports a running command-line script Ctrl-C.
It can gather data without leaving the context.
Prefix
Prefixby Stackify is an easy-to-install and lightweight code profiler that many developers love.
It helps you eliminate the bottlenecks in your system performance to optimize it and improve the user experience.
It provides your developers with the real power ofAPM(utility performance monitoring).
Discover all the underperforming queries, unknown bottlenecks, and ORM-generated queries.
you might also track each SQL call parameter, download the timings, and view the affected records.
Prefix makes it simpler to spot N+1 patterns as well.
Forget about sorting through all those messy logs; bring them together to locate issues easily.
These dependencies can be web services, 3rd-party services, cache services, and others.
Scalene
Scaleneis a high-precision, high-performing GPU, CPU, and memory profiler for Python-based programs.
Scalene is incredibly fast and utilizes sampling rather than instrumentation.
It does not even rely on the tracing facilities of Python.
In addition to this, its overhead is usually below 10-20%.
These details are more valuable than those at function-level profiling.
Scalene separates the time spent purely in Python from that of native code that includes libraries.
Scalene can report GPU time, profiles memory usage and tracks CPU usage.
It is a visual software that integrates lightweight profiling functionalities and command-line JDK tools.
This tool is a perfect fit for different requirements of quality engineers, system admins, and end-users.
It detects remotely and locally running Java-based applications automatically and lists them.
The tool also allows you to define the programs manually using the JMX connection.
Both instrumentation and sampling profilers can be performed using VisualVM for memory management and tool performance.
It displays thread dumps to provide quick insights into processes.
Furthermore, VisualVM can read basic data on a crashed Java-based process along with its environment.
It works on Windows, Linux, and Unix.
Orbit Profiler
Visualize your C/C++ tool and find performance issues quickly usingOrbit Profiler.
Next, it will start profiling once you complete downloading its program.
The tool jumps to the target process, hooks itself to selected functions, and performs profiling.
It can even work on your optimized final or shipping builds.
It works on Windows and Linux.
The tool can trace java arguments and methods on user codes without changing them.
It can even trace the Spark apps HDFS file paths to find out hot files and perform further optimization.
Hence, people can correlate metrics easily for these machines or processes.
Its features include:
Tracy
Tracyis a useful tool to help developers debug PHP programs easily.
It has a friendly design and advanced features such as CLI support, debugging AJAX calls, and more.
Tracy comes with logging functionality and environment autodetection.
It stores data into log files and displays server error messages to a visitor during downtimes.
Tracy can also integrate with Drupal 7, OpenCart, WordPress, and more.
vprof
vprofis a visual profiler for Python applications.
It is available under a BSD license and supports Python 3.4 and above.
Conclusion
utility performance is a crucial factor in fulfilling the expectation of end-users.
And if performance issues occur, you must be ready to diagnose the issue before impacting theend-user experience.
Here is a quick comparison table showing the above profilers and what it is mostly used for.
