Improve documentation for new allocation profiler #45268

gdalle · 2022-05-10T21:57:59Z

Hi, and thank you for the awesome new allocation profiler!

I feel like it is not obvious from the documentation (manual page and API reference) how to retrieve and visualize the results from Profile.Allocs.@profile.

PProf.jl is mentioned, but not the specific function we need to call (PProf.Allocs.pprof). I think it would make sense to describe an example workflow in the manual (see below).

In addition, I guess users would be interested to know if there is any visualization (eg. @profview) or pretty-printing (eg. Profile.print()) method that works directly in the REPL / VSCode / Pluto.

julia> using Profile, PProf

julia> Profile.Allocs.clear()

julia> peakflops(); Profile.Allocs.@profile sample_rate=1 peakflops()
6.474132101420371e10

julia> results = Profile.Allocs.fetch();

julia> PProf.Allocs.pprof(results; from_c=false)
Analyzing 11 allocation samples... 100%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| Time: 0:00:00
Main binary filename not available.
Serving web UI on http://localhost:62261
"alloc-profile.pb.gz"

The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered:

gdalle · 2022-05-10T22:08:51Z

Related discussions:

Julia allocation profiler PR (Allocation profiler #42768)
PProf support PR (Add support for the Allocs profiles produced by Julia's Allocs Profiler JuliaPerf/PProf.jl#46)
ProfileView issue (Feature request: memory flame graphs timholy/ProfileView.jl#166)
FlameGraphs issue (FlameGraphs for memory profiler? timholy/FlameGraphs.jl#52)

kongdd · 2022-06-27T15:10:59Z

I am using Julia v1.7.3. Why I have no function Profile.Allocs.@profile?

gbaraldi · 2022-06-27T16:01:30Z

It's 1.8 and up only unfortunately

vchuravy · 2022-06-27T21:58:40Z

cc: @vilterp @NHDaly

KristofferC · 2022-07-04T18:36:57Z

👍 . Was trying to use this today and the docs are quite underwhelming in describing how it should be used.

gdalle · 2022-07-04T19:27:43Z

Pinging @pfitzseb since the easiest visualization tool might soon be the VSCode extension

pfitzseb · 2022-07-04T21:01:36Z

The allocation profile viewer should already be in the latest release of the extension (if I didn't mess up while writing the changelog). Should be as simple as a @profview_allocs (but of course we don't have any real documentation either).

NHDaly · 2022-08-16T21:00:01Z

There are a few things that I would like to see added to the documentation:

there are multiple visualization tools now (just like with CPU profiles), including:
- PProf
- VSCode profile viewer
- viewing the results directly in the REPL
- ... others?
the sample_rate has to be considered carefully (just like with CPU profiling)

Is there anything else that people feel is missing?

NHDaly · 2022-08-16T21:00:09Z

cc: @bergel

IanButterworth · 2022-09-02T18:27:26Z

Just a bump because of confusion in the wild https://discourse.julialang.org/t/what-is-wrong-with-this-code/86695

IanButterworth · 2022-09-13T15:33:39Z

Just a note that the docs should mention clearly shortcomings related to #43688

vtjnash · 2022-09-20T21:18:03Z

I wrote some code that users can load into Profile.Allocs which works to complete the API with a builtin print function mostly identical to Profile.print, which doesn't need an external tool to be available (though is less interactive than those tools already mentioned here) and can convert from Allocs-format to flat or tree format (including support for most configuration flags): https://gist.github.com/vtjnash/c6aa4db9dafccb0fd28a65f87d6b1adb

IanButterworth · 2022-10-13T21:49:29Z

@fingolfin helped with #47144

nickrobinson251 · 2022-11-02T14:48:26Z

Maybe we could add the JuliaCon talk by @NHDaly and @vilterp to the docs?
e.g. include it at https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/profile/#Allocation-Profiler

ojwoodford · 2023-06-01T13:24:48Z

👍 . Was trying to use this today and the docs are quite underwhelming in describing how it should be used.

This section of the docs is still very underwhelming. Some example code is needed.

NHDaly · 2023-07-07T18:04:46Z

HOKAY - i'm finally taking a stab at improving this, while I'm editing the docs in #50337.

Can you all please take a look and see what else you'd like to add? Thank you!
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/50337/files#diff-5daf211b5059d9eebb3cea99608a874dfd552ea395cfde31a229141b7720ea90

NHDaly · 2023-07-07T18:16:13Z

Here's the current Profiling docs page as of that PR:
Profiling docs page.zip

Pass the types to the allocator functions. ------- Before this PR, we were missing the types for allocations in two cases: 1. allocations from codegen 2. allocations in `gc_managed_realloc_` The second one is easy: those are always used for buffers, right? For the first one: we extend the allocation functions called from codegen, to take the type as a parameter, and set the tag there. I kept the old interfaces around, since I think that they cannot be removed due to supporting legacy code? ------ An example of the generated code: ```julia %ptls_field6 = getelementptr inbounds {}**, {}*** %4, i64 2 %13 = bitcast {}*** %ptls_field6 to i8** %ptls_load78 = load i8*, i8** %13, align 8 %box = call noalias nonnull dereferenceable(32) {}* @ijl_gc_pool_alloc_typed(i8* %ptls_load78, i32 1184, i32 32, i64 4366152144) #7 ``` Fixes #43688. Fixes #45268. Co-authored-by: Valentin Churavy <[email protected]>

Backports PR JuliaLang#50337 for RAI julia v1.9.2 Original description: =================== Pass the types to the allocator functions. ------- Before this PR, we were missing the types for allocations in two cases: 1. allocations from codegen 2. allocations in `gc_managed_realloc_` The second one is easy: those are always used for buffers, right? For the first one: we extend the allocation functions called from codegen, to take the type as a parameter, and set the tag there. I kept the old interfaces around, since I think that they cannot be removed due to supporting legacy code? ------ An example of the generated code: ```julia %ptls_field6 = getelementptr inbounds {}**, {}*** %4, i64 2 %13 = bitcast {}*** %ptls_field6 to i8** %ptls_load78 = load i8*, i8** %13, align 8 %box = call noalias nonnull dereferenceable(32) {}* @ijl_gc_pool_alloc_typed(i8* %ptls_load78, i32 1184, i32 32, i64 4366152144) #7 ``` Fixes JuliaLang#43688. Fixes JuliaLang#45268. Co-authored-by: Valentin Churavy <[email protected]>

Pass the types to the allocator functions. ------- Before this PR, we were missing the types for allocations in two cases: 1. allocations from codegen 2. allocations in `gc_managed_realloc_` The second one is easy: those are always used for buffers, right? For the first one: we extend the allocation functions called from codegen, to take the type as a parameter, and set the tag there. I kept the old interfaces around, since I think that they cannot be removed due to supporting legacy code? ------ An example of the generated code: ```julia %ptls_field6 = getelementptr inbounds {}**, {}*** %4, i64 2 %13 = bitcast {}*** %ptls_field6 to i8** %ptls_load78 = load i8*, i8** %13, align 8 %box = call noalias nonnull dereferenceable(32) {}* @ijl_gc_pool_alloc_typed(i8* %ptls_load78, i32 1184, i32 32, i64 4366152144) #7 ``` Fixes JuliaLang#43688. Fixes JuliaLang#45268. Co-authored-by: Valentin Churavy <[email protected]>

NHDaly self-assigned this Jul 11, 2022

IanButterworth mentioned this issue Sep 13, 2022

Document how the allocation profiler should be used #46740

Closed

IanButterworth added docs This change adds or pertains to documentation profiler labels Sep 13, 2022

nickrobinson251 mentioned this issue Sep 28, 2022

Profile: Add a native way to display allocation profiler output #46742

Open

NHDaly mentioned this issue Jul 7, 2023

Allocation Profiler: Types for all allocations #50337

Merged

vchuravy closed this as completed in #50337 Jul 31, 2023

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Improve documentation for new allocation profiler #45268

Improve documentation for new allocation profiler #45268

gdalle commented May 10, 2022 •

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gdalle commented May 10, 2022 •

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kongdd commented Jun 27, 2022

gbaraldi commented Jun 27, 2022

vchuravy commented Jun 27, 2022

KristofferC commented Jul 4, 2022 •

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gdalle commented Jul 4, 2022

pfitzseb commented Jul 4, 2022

NHDaly commented Aug 16, 2022

NHDaly commented Aug 16, 2022

IanButterworth commented Sep 2, 2022

IanButterworth commented Sep 13, 2022

vtjnash commented Sep 20, 2022

IanButterworth commented Oct 13, 2022

nickrobinson251 commented Nov 2, 2022

ojwoodford commented Jun 1, 2023

NHDaly commented Jul 7, 2023

NHDaly commented Jul 7, 2023

Improve documentation for new allocation profiler #45268

Improve documentation for new allocation profiler #45268

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gdalle commented May 10, 2022 • edited Loading

gdalle commented May 10, 2022 • edited Loading

kongdd commented Jun 27, 2022

gbaraldi commented Jun 27, 2022

vchuravy commented Jun 27, 2022

KristofferC commented Jul 4, 2022 • edited Loading

gdalle commented Jul 4, 2022

pfitzseb commented Jul 4, 2022

NHDaly commented Aug 16, 2022

NHDaly commented Aug 16, 2022

IanButterworth commented Sep 2, 2022

IanButterworth commented Sep 13, 2022

vtjnash commented Sep 20, 2022

IanButterworth commented Oct 13, 2022

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ojwoodford commented Jun 1, 2023

NHDaly commented Jul 7, 2023

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gdalle commented May 10, 2022 •

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