Profiling X, KDE, KWin and friends...

[Adam Jackson]

On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 09:26 +0100, Ilyes Gouta wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Do I have to install the -debuginfo equivalent of the packages I
> intend to profile?

You don't _have_ to, but you really want to.  sysprof will try valiantly
to find symbol names in whatever binary the stack trace happens to be
in, but if you don't have debuginfo installed, most symbol names will be
unavailable.  So you'll see something like "Xorg is spending all of its
time in main()", which might be true but isn't particularly informative.

> Were the -release packages already compiled with -O2 -g flags so that
> we already have the necessary debugging information embedded into the
> code?

The world is built with -g, but the debugging information itself is
split off at rpm build time into the -debuginfo subpackage.

> What about X? On the sysprof website, it's mentioned that it has to be
> recompiled from source and to avoid the generation of static modules..
> Is it the case for the X server shipped with Fedora?

That warning hasn't been true since Xorg 7.0, which was FC5.

There is one caveat in profiling X, which is that since the X server
runs as root, you'll need to run sysprof as root in order to be able to
trace it.  'sudo sysprof &' from the command line should work.

- ajax
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