Proof of concept: how to profile poor performing programs

[eried]

Hello, this is a little draft of a guide to analyze hp prime apps based on performance.

I am going to use an early version of the game Radioactive Wastes http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-4840.html by komame.

First my idea is to put the profiling information in the terminal (I noticed that the terminal is limited, so this will be a problem but it is OK as a general information about the method). I am going to use the comments:



A simple regex should do the job. Now we run the modified app and copy the results to Excel or something similar:


The final column will just be the difference between events. Of course for a serious analysis is you need to define these in a much better way in your code, at the start of a function, or a loop you want to analyze.

Now I added a main category (I identified these after capturing some data) and then we use a pivot table/chart:


And finally we can see all the times each section took, averages, etc:






Or more fancier ways to see the time impacts of the code segments:






(these last graphs are from Excel 2016)