We Should Use Instrumented Profiling Scopes More

I have made an entire talk about profiling. Still, I keep running across projects that don’t use profilers much or at all. Or even more commonly, they do use profilers but do not know they can enrich their projects with profiler markers that would make captures more valuable and much easier to parse. Let’s fix that! Two and a half profiler types There’s many profilers out there, often split based on which form of profiling capture they rely upon: Sampling, which periodically pauses the program, records the stack trace of every threads, then continues. By doing this often enough (at least 1kHz, preferably more), we can build a breakdown of where on average does our capture spends CPU time. This is the default capture mode when using Instruments, vTune, Superluminal, Visual Studio or VerySleepy). Instrumented, where the program itself records time slices when markers are invoked. This requires code hooked up to the profiler to be added in the project and only markers present when the…