ghcprofview README

This is GHC .prof files viewer, implemented in Haskell + Gtk3.

Unlike profiterole and profiteur, ghcprofview uses a traditional approach to profiling. It allows you to view cost centres tree as it is and browse it interactively, and allows you to do some actions that you may be used to in, for example, Java's visualvm.

See also a very similar application in Python + Qt5 - ghcprofview-py.

Features

• GUI is tab-oriented. Default tab is called "All" and contains the whole tree. Other tabs may appear when you do filtering or some other actions. You may close unneeded tabs.
• Two additional columns in addition to what we have in standard GHC's text .prof output:
  • Time Relative: share of "Time Inherited" of this item with relation to it's parent item. For example, if this item has "Time Inherited" 20%, and it's parent has "Time Inherited" 30%, then "Time Relative" is 20% / 30% = 66.66%.
  • Alloc Relative: same, but about "Alloc Inherited".
• Click on column header to sort by that column.
• Right-click on table header to select which columns to display.
• Double-click at the edge of column header to adjust column width automatically.
• Use Search and Next buttons to search function by name. There are three search modes available: Contains (search by substring), Exact (search for exact match), Reg.Exp (search by regular expression).
• Use filters to display interesting records only. Filter results will be shown in separate tab.
  • Supported fields for filtering are: Entries, Time Individual, Alloc Individual, Time Inherited, Alloc Inherited, Module (by substring match), Source (by substring match).
  • Filter works by AND; so if you set Entries = 5, Module = "Gui", then you will be searching for items that have entries >= 5 AND in module "Gui".
  • Logic of filter application to the tree is the following: it keeps an item if that item conforms to filter conditions, OR if it has child items that conform to filter condition.
• "Narrow view to selected item" in right-click menu. This will open a tab and show only selected item and it's descendants.
• "Group all outgoing calls" in right-click menu. This does the following:
  • Searches for all occurences of selected function in the tree.
  • Merges call subtrees of these occurences into new tree; for example, if function "search" appeared in one place with "time inherited" of 15%, and in another place with 10%, then in the merged tree you will see it with 25%.
  • Displays the result in a new tab.
• "Group all incoming calls" in right-click menu. This does the following:
  • Searches for all occurences of selected function in the tree.
  • Reverses call stacks of found occurences and merges them into a new tree. So in that tree, the root will be the item you selected, and it's children will be all functions that call the selected function, and so on. Numbers are merged similar to "group all outgoing calls" function.
  • Displays the result in a new tab.
• Text format of .prof files is supported; there is support for Json format, but it is buggy currently.

Installation

Install it by stack:

$ git clone https://github.com/portnov/ghcprofview-hs.git
$ cd ghcprofview-hs/
$ stack install

Installing it by nix-shell: $ nix-shell -p haskellPackages.ghcprofview