Hotspot Version 1.3.0 Released Overview of New Features and Improvements

02.09.2020 Milian Wolff No comments

We are pleased to announce a new release of our Hotspot Linux perf performance analysis GUI, Hotspot version 1.3.0!

Hotspot is a replacement for perf reportthat takes a perf.data file, parses and evaluates its contents, and then displays the result in a graphical form. You can read a bit more about Hotspot here: https://www.kdab.com/hotspot-gui-linux-perf-profiler/

Overview of New Features and Improvements

With this new release, Hotspot has become much faster at interpreting data for large, complex applications; analyzing perf.data files for firefox,e.g. with its monster libxul, is now magnitudes faster than it was in the previous releases of Hotspot.

On top of that, we now properly support analysis of zstd compressed data files, for example, those obtained via perf record -z. This support feature easily reduces the size of the perf.data files by one to two orders of magnitude.

The timeline has been improved and now shows tick marks on the time axes, as well as smart time unit prefixes when zoomed in:

You can view the original request for this feature here: https://github.com/KDAB/hotspot/pull/238

Additionally, hotspot can now demangle rustc symbols:

You can view the original request for this feature here: https://github.com/KDAB/hotspot/issues/239

Finally, we’ve updated the perfparser submodule with a plethora of fixes and improvements. Better support for fork-based parallelism is among the numerous improvements that we’ve made.

How can you get the new release?

You can download Hotspot version 1.3.0 from KDAB’s GitHub at this link, where you can also find the list of fixes in this version: https://github.com/KDAB/hotspot/releases/tag/v1.3.0

Try it out and let us know what you think! Please report issues on GitHub, but we are also open to any kind of feedback through the comment field below. If you want to learn more about perf and hotspot, also consider attending one of our Linux specific profiling and debugging training classes.