intern project on profiling sugar

[Riccardo Lucchese]

Hi

I'm riccardo lucchese (rl) and will be an intern at olpc for the next ten weeks.
My initial proposal for the internship was working on profiling sugar.
i.e. why is activities startup so long ? ;)

Right now I'm working on a tool for gathering cpu/mem/io statistics on the xo
that produces pretty figures like bootchart does
(http://www.bootchart.org/images/bootchart.png); the problem with bootchart
was that it is quite heavyweight at decent sampling frequencies.

This tool will be used for profiling activities startup and other
actions suffering of long delaying. It is almost finished.


With the same goal I'm writing a script that extracts perfs timings
from data logged by sugar components so that it will be possible
to run automated `regression' tests in the future.


These tools will be used with other common profiling tools like the embedded
python profiler, sysprof and oprofile.


I was told that some of you have already specifically worked on this;
that would be great if you could share your gotchas ;)


I appreciate any hints on features those tools should have
and any comments on this work!


Thanks !

riccardo