Hotspot v1.6.0 released

Hotspot is a standalone GUI designed to provide a user-friendly interface for analyzing performance data. It takes a perf.data file, parses and evaluates its contents, and presents the results in a visually appealing and easily understandable manner. Hotspot’s goal is to offer a modern alternative to perf report, making performance analysis on Linux systems more intuitive and efficient.

Version 1.6.0 introduces powerful new features, improved workflows, and numerous bug fixes to make profiling even smoother.

ChangeLog for Hotspot v1.6.0

This release focuses on usability improvements and extended analysis capabilities. The most notable additions are:

• Support for archived perf files (e.g. perf.data.zip)
• Regex filtering in the flamegraph
• Tracepoint support
• Various bug fixes and stability improvements

Open Archived perf Files Directly

Hotspot can now open perf recordings stored inside archives such as perf.data.zip.

This simplifies sharing profiling results, storing CI artifacts, and working with compressed recordings - no manual extraction required.

Regex in the Flamegraph

The Flamegraph view now supports regular expression filtering.

This makes it much easier to:

• Match complex symbol patterns
• Focus on specific subsystems or namespaces
• Quickly narrow down large profiling datasets

Especially for large C++ codebases, regex search significantly speeds up navigation.

Tracepoint Support

Hotspot 1.6.0 introduces support for tracepoints captured via perf.

This enables analysis of event-based data in addition to traditional sampling, giving deeper insight into system and runtime behavior.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

As usual, this release also includes numerous smaller fixes, UI refinements, and internal cleanups to improve overall stability and user experience.

For a complete overview of all changes, see the full changelog on GitHub.

Happy profiling!

Videos

Hotspot - A GUI for perf report:

Hotspot Demo from Embedded World 2022: