How to profile applications on Linux?

[Fancy2209]

What the title states.
Adobe Scout almost works on wine but the UI is all red and barely works.
I'd really appreciate a way to profile that isn't just add traces everywhere

[ajwfrost]

I generally run Scout on a Windows machine that's accessible from the same network and then get the Linux machine to point to it...

[marchbold]

@Fancy2209 This is a great idea!! Would be cool for CI/CD pipeline testing too i'd imagine...

[Fancy2209]

@Fancy2209 This is a great idea!! Would be cool for CI/CD pipeline testing too i'd imagine...

Profiling in automated testing environments? What would be the purpose of that?

[marchbold]

Any additional tests we can build into testing pipelines are always helpful to identify issues before releasing to customers :) Profiling can highlight any performance changes between builds. But yes you are right, profilers are generally a development tool rather than testing.

[ajwfrost]

Initial feedback .. it should be possible to get some kind of tool together that pretends to be Scout and listens out for connections from the AIR runtime. The actual communication protocol is straightforward at a low level - just AMF3.

Curiously, the IDataInput.readObject() method only works once, if your input stream contains objects that are written with references i.e. the first time you encounter it, the class is defined, and then instances just refer back to that definition. But subsequent calls to readObject() have forgotten the earlier information so it then fails. This is something that I can't help thinking makes the whole function completely useless, so we are planning to change that in the next feature update of the AIR SDK...

So with that change, we can basically read in all the data from the socket and so get the telemetry information packets from the runtime.

The next step though is to decipher and present them. The key question here though: what information would be useful?

@Fancy2209 assuming you did want a command-line mechanism to analyze a Scout log, what functionality or behaviour would you like for this?

For example - I'm thinking that you could launch this with some options so that, whilst it's running, you can potentially see things like debug traces, average FPS values, errors/exceptions, GC timings, etc? Plus a 'stream to file' option which I think is what you were initially alluding to.

But what would be most useful for you here? (open question to everyone!)

thanks

[Fancy2209]

I was thinking you'd run the tool and it'd record all data you want, and then you could have it print information, just because printing everything to tty could get noisy, option to save session to file and print some things would be a good junction of the 2 ideas.

I just wanted to do basic profiling to see what was doing too many allocations/taking too much time running to see if what I added to the starling canvas could be optimized

[Fancy2209]

@gpeacock, author of Adobe Scout has a tool called flmserv.py that acts as a scout server.
https://github.com/gpeacock/telemetry-tools
@ajwfrost I guess this makes it so Wipro doesn't need to remake this in AS3?

[ajwfrost]

Oh that's useful! I didn't know about those other tools...

Definitely simplest to just use (or develop) those ones I think!

[pngdrift]

It seems that the latest version of wine has fixed red UI in Adobe Scout.