Should I consider VTune for Delphi?

Question

Starting all the questions about profiling tools, I was surprised to find Intel's VTune , which I had not heard about before. At $ 700, it's even more expensive than AQTime .

But before deciding to allocate big bucks for AQTime, someone used VTune for Delphi, and if so, do you think that it has some advantages that can make it a better choice than AQTime and other profiling tools? for Delphi who are there ?

Answer 1

You can download the trial version for 30 days and try it yourself.

I used AQTime and VTune.

VTune is good if you want to test a multi-threaded application - this will help me find locks in the memory manager that slow down my multi-threaded part of the application.

The difference in the differences is that VTune is a sample profiler and AQTime is a profiler tool. Both have strengths and weaknesses, but I personally prefer the tool alone. With the tool profiler, you get accurate information about how many times your function has been called, all the callers of this procedure, etc. With the cost of inaccurate time results, toolkit profilers change the way the processor processes the code, so branch forecasts and cache work differently, so work slowly in a real and tested application.

But the most important is the graphical interface, and here is the AQTime gain. This is a powerful application, but very easy to use. VTune is completely different. I have lost too much time to find the right team in VTune. The GUI is very dirty.

Therefore, with the exception of multithreading, I use AQTime.

Answer 2

VTune can read low-level CPU counters, such as branch prediction, cache misses, etc. I used it to find out why TopMM (multi-threaded memory scaling manager!) Was so slow on my Hyperthreading processor. There was a bit of a 64K cache smoothing. Thus, it gives more information in the section, how it works on the processor, and why something happens slowly due to misses in the cache, etc. For real optimization (last%) I would use both options: for normal optimization, use AQ or others (for example, my asmprofiler :-))