KCachegrind / QCachegrind -========================

{K,Q}Cachegrind is a KDE/Qt GUI to visualize profiling data. It’s mainly used as visualization frontend for data measured by Cachegrind/Callgrind tools from the Valgrind package, but there are converters for other measurement tools available.

Features

• direct support for profiles generated by Cachegrind/Callgrind
• support for arbitrary event types and derived event types
• sorted function list, with grouping according to ELF object/source file/symbol namespace (such as C++ classes)
• correct handling of recursive cycles (similar to GProf)
• various visualization views for a selected function, such as
  • treemap in caller/callee direction
  • call graph around function
  • source & assembly annotation

Hmm. What is stuff good for?

Any work in improving the performance of a program should be started with measuring the performance characteristics of the optimized binary, using representative input data. This process is called “Profiling”. Any other way for performance optimization usually just wastes developer time. Profile measurements show whether optimization is needed at all, and what improvement can be expected. Further, it pinpoint at functions and source lines where most time is spent, i.e. where an improvement has most influence on allover runtime.

{K,Q}Cachegrind visualizes profile measurement data. Example of an easy to use profile measurement tool (no source modifications and recompilation is required, as well as no root access) are the cache simulators Cachegrind and Callgrind from the Valgrind toolset. While {K,Q}Cachegrind directly supports the formats of these profiling tools, converters are available to allow to import data from other profiling tools, too.

Compilation and Installation -===========================

QCachegrind

Requirements:

• Qt5.x (x >=2) (earlier versions not tested)
• Any platform supported by Qt (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, …)

Compilation (from base directory):

qmake; make

To not build in the source directories, do:

mkdir build; cd build; qmake ../qcg.pro; make

The build includes the command line tool “cgview”.

Copy the resulting “qcachegrind” binary from the build directory into your $PATH. For better desktop integration, it should be enough to copy the .desktop file and icons into standard places, such as:

sudo install -m 755 qcachegrind/qcachegrind /usr/local/bin
sudo install -m 644 qcachegrind/qcachegrind.desktop \
    /usr/local/share/applications/
sudo install -m 644 kcachegrind/hi32-app-kcachegrind.png \
    /usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/32x32/apps/kcachegrind.png
sudo install -m 644 kcachegrind/hi48-app-kcachegrind.png \
    /usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/kcachegrind.png

KCachegrind

Requirements:

• KF 5.12 or higher: Frameworks development packages (libs & headers)
• CMake

Commands (from base directory):

cmake .; make; make install

To not build in the source directories, do:

mkdir build; cd build; cmake ..; make; make install

The build also compiles the command line tool “cgview” and “qcachegrind”, the Qt-only version of KCachegrind. However, these are not installed. If you want to also install qcachegrind, see instructions above.

Usage & Help -===========

{K,Q}Cachegrind has detailed “What’s this?” help for each GUI part. For further help, see quick start pages on kcachegrind.sf.net

Josef Weidendorfer