Enhancements to 'Very Sleepy' C++ CPU profiler

June 5, 2011 · programming/cpp · cpp github profiler

I've been using the excellent CPU sampling profiler Very Sleepy for quite a while now. The most recent version however had one serious problem for me: sporadic GetThreadContext failures that resulted in aborting the profiler.

Additionally there were some other improvements I was interested in, and since I couldn't find any public depot for the source I decided to create one at github.

The latest forked version can be downloaded here. It includes the following changes:

fixed the sporadic GetThreadContext-related profile abort
fixed symbol lookup issues if EXE is started from profiler
added option to pause/resume profiling, w/ cmdline option to start profiling paused
option to use very fast (but non-FPO-aware) stack walker, profiling rate using this one is >100x faster

Future plans are right now:

API to control profiler from profiled program (e.g. to profile only a certain section of code under certain conditions)
'frame based' profiler: have the option to capture a profile multiple times (for example once per 'game frame')