SamplingProfiler v1.7.4 is now available. This version adds an option for Delphi 2010 paths, and fixes a bug with the silent mode execution that would render it inoperative. There also have been other minor changes, mostly cosmetic.
This release also includes preparation for an “attach to process” option, which is currently not enabled, but should hopefully make in the next version (available “when ready”).
SamplingProfiler v1.7.3 has now been released and should be used in place of 1.7.2 which was pulled.
1.7.2 had a nasty bug in the timings statistics (promptly spotted by Robert Houdart) which should be fixed in 1.7.3, there are no other changes and additions in this version.
SamplingProfiler v1.7.2 has now been released.
This version includes the following changes:
The UI has been slightly rearrange to accomodate the CPU affinity options (I guess I’ll need to find something prettier for those upcoming 256 core CPUs…). There may be other indirect minor changes.
There is something about WordPress that reminds me of Delphi, not the language or the IDE, but the spirit. On the one hand, its a convenient and comfortable environment out of the box, to which ready-made functionality can be easily added, and on the other hand everything under the hood is still accessible and tweakable without having to fork in a major way (like Delphi, unlike most of the rest of them).
Anyway, I’ve added support for printable versions of the articles here, thanks to Lester Chan’s WP-Print, a wee bit of CSS & php tweaking is all it took. Hopefully the dead-tree lovers that asked for it should be satisfied, as well as those few that manually tried to append a “/print” to the url 
ZJDBGPack is again available, but as an independent download (it used to be bundled with SamplingProfiler).
This is a command-line utility intended for use in a build process or from the Delphi tools menu, whose purpose is to integrate debug information into an executable. The debug information format is a compressed version of JCL’s JDBG.
As of know, SamplingProfiler is the only published utility that understands this format, so you can use it either to reduce the size of the executables you deploy for profiling purposes, or if you do not want to deploy directly-readable debug information files.
SamplingProfiler v1.7.1 is now available, it fixes the crash in the paths dialog reported by Kazan in the forums.
Incidentally this was due to a very old Delphi 5 bit of code that somehow survived Delphi 2009 at the compilation level, but bombed at runtime… I dropped the code and made use of the already existing D2009 version, hence the smaller executable.
For further details on this version, see the v1.7.0 post.
SamplingProfiler v1.7.0 is now available, you can get the zip and release details from its changelog page.
As announced last week, the changes are a fix for a bug that could drastically affect the execution speed of the profiled application when relying on MAP files for debug information, if you were hit by this bug, things should be like night and day with this version (and hopefully I didn’t break anything else in the process…).
The other main addition is that of the real-time monitor, which with default parameters and when activated locally should be reachable at http://localhost:880/ (see the help for other details). The monitor is still at an early stage, and only provides real-time information, as time allows, it may grow to offer more profiling and debug features.
The current monitor page is a rather basic html page that is fully refreshed periodically, which isn’t very pretty at the moment… an XML version of the real-time information is available at http://localhost:880/sampling.xml, if you come up with a pretty AJAX-based version before I do, feel free to contribute it
MapFileStats v1.2 is now available for download, it fixes reported issues and introduces a few minor improvements, such as using the ability to abort search paths scans and remembering MAP File and Search Paths options between executions. You can find the complete list in the changelog.
In other news v1.7 of SamplingProfiler should be ready “soon”. It fixes a bug that could drastically reduce the profiled application’s execution speed (when using MAP file information), and will introduce a “Real Time Monitor”, which allows to see what a profiled application is doing in real-time (unsurprisingly).
The monitor is actually a simple web server embedded into the profiler, so you can monitor an application that is run locally or on another machine. Real-time data will be accessible both as a bare-bones HTML page, or in XML form for the AJAX freaks out there.
This morning while debugging a statistical ichthyo-parser I stumbled upon what looked like a Delphi 2009 compiler bug: the compiler was outputting gibberish ASM opcodes… But after further investigations, it appeared this wasn’t completely gibberish, but that it was (somewhat) correct MSIL bytecode!
What’s more, a quick hexadecimal examination of dcc32.exe yelded that this MSIL codegen looks like it can be forced by using an undocumented command-line compiler switch: -af
The resulting exe won’t run because it’s a mismatch of Win32 headers and MSIL bytecode… What do you think?
Did CodeGear plan supporting unmanaged code in managed executables or managed code in native executables?
Update: here is a screenshot of the switch in action.
