An ActionScript profiler

When i was working on a proof-of-concept project i needed to know more about my code performances and googling for an AS3 profiler just pointed to ASProf, an AS2 profiler.

So i decided to write one, porting my other C++-based profiler belonging to another project: originally inspired by an article of Steve Rabin in the Game Programming Gems #1 book.

It's always wise to remember that if you are serious about code profiling, you are better off to search for some professional tools: in the C++ arena my choice would have been Compuware's DevStudio, but GlowCode is an interesting alternative.

At the time i was writing ActionScript code, however, i didn't find any really usable tool for the job, so i thought to release it under a zlib/png license and some hints on how it works here.

Usage

Once you included/imported/copied/referenced the package in your project, add the profiler's output (a Sprite) to your local render queue, and then set it up with some basic configuration:

ProfilerConfig.Width = stage.stageWidth;
ProfilerConfig.ShowMinMax = true;
prof = new Profiler( 32 );
addChild( prof );

Now let's fake some work and feed the profiler with some data:

var i: int = 0;
var it: int = 1000000;

prof.beginProfiling();

i = it;
prof.begin( "fadd" );
while( i-- ) { fRes += 1.; }
prof.end( "fadd" );

i = it;
prof.begin( "iadd" );
while( i-- ) { iRes += 1; }
prof.end( "iadd" );

i = it;
prof.begin( "fsub" );
while( i-- ) { fRes -= 1.; }
prof.end( "fsub" );

i = it;
prof.begin( "isub" );
while( i-- ) { iRes -= 1; }
prof.end( "isub" );

prof.endProfiling();

The profiler should show some signs of life, like the following screenshots:

And this is it! Another useful thing the profiler can do is grouping, so that you can group different code fragments belonging to your most logical schema, by wrapping the same ProfileNode around the various different code fragments: here i'm grouping math operations by their type, just to keep things organized a bit:

var i: int = 0;
var it: int = 1000000;

prof.beginProfiling();

i = it;
prof.begin( "float", true );
prof.begin( "fadd" );
while( i-- ) { fRes += 1.; }
prof.end( "fadd" );
prof.end( "float" );

i = it;
prof.begin( "int", true );
prof.begin( "iadd" );
while( i-- ) { iRes += 1; }
prof.end( "iadd" );
prof.end( "int" );

i = it;
prof.begin( "float", true );
prof.begin( "fsub" );
while( i-- ) { fRes -= 1.; }
prof.end( "fsub" );
prof.end( "float" );

i = it;
prof.begin( "int", true );
prof.begin( "isub" );
while( i-- ) { iRes -= 1; }
prof.end( "isub" );
prof.end( "int" );

prof.endProfiling();

Now the graph should look somewhat better:

That's all there is to it, hope it will be useful!