Prof_spacetime

prof_spacetime is a viewer for OCaml "spacetime" profiles.

Installation

The easiest way to install is using OPAM:

opam install prof_spacetime

For installing from source see the dependencies and build instructions in the opam file.

Creating a spacetime profile

To create a spacetime profile from a run of an executable you must build that executable with a spacetime-enabled OCaml compiler:

opam switch 4.04.0+spacetime
eval `opam config env`
make foo.exe

Then run your executable with the OCAML_SPACETIME_INTERVAL environment variable set to an interval in milliseconds between snapshots:

OCAML_SPACETIME_INTERVAL=100 foo.exe test-data

this will produce a file with a name like spacetime-1234 where 1234 was the pid of the process.

Viewing profiles in the browser

To view a spacetime profile in the browser use the serve command:

prof_spacetime serve spacetime-1234

By default, this will serve the profile on 127.0.0.1:8080. The address and port can be changed with the --address and --port options.

Viewing profiles in the terminal

To view a spacetime profile in the terminal use the view command:

prof_spacetime view spacetime-1234

Preprocessing spacetime profiles

Processing a spacetime profile can take a while. To avoid redoing this work each time you want to serve the profile you can use the process command:

prof_spacetime process spacetime-1234

which will create a preprocessed version of the profile spacetime-1234.p. This can then be passed to the serve or view commands using the -p flag:

prof_spacetime serve -p spacetime-1234.p

Locations for C function calls

To get locations for C function calls, you should also use the -e option to pass prof_spacetime the executable from which the profile was generated. This works with all commands:

prof_spacetime serve -e foo.exe spacetime-1234