flip y axis?

[StefanKarpinski]

@one-more-minute showed me flame plots with the stack growing downward and it was shockingly more intuitive. Perhaps this should be the default?

[timholy]

That's a really interesting idea. All the flamegraphs I had seen previously were oriented the other way. Are there other examples you can point me to? (Not that we have to follow any kind of tradition; I agree that downward has more than a little logic to it.)

[timholy]

Seems like I should finally get around to trying out LightTable (sorry I haven't before, @one-more-minute).

[MikeInnes]

No problem at all, Tim – I hope you like it. You should be able to get the profile view by calling profile(). Just in case it doesn't work properly (not entirely unlikely) I saved some sample output here (using the example from the ProfileView.jl readme). Let me know if you have any feedback on what I've got going so far, of course.

[timholy]

You've clearly put some serious thought into this. I like the display a lot. I'm so used to the flipped orientation that I'm still adjusting, but I could easily see switching. Might be nice to take a survey of "naive" users and see what they think.

At least one question, though: what's up with the different vertical heights of the bars? As far as I can tell it's directly related to their width. But then isn't that redundant and, if you're thinking in terms of area being related to importance, almost misleading?

Also, one of the things I like about ProfileView is its use of red to indicate allocation, since that's often an important clue for optimization. Is that something you think would be valuable?

But overall, I find many aspects of the presentation (how the popups work, the choice of text to display, and its clean visual elegance) to be inspiring.

[MikeInnes]

Well, glad you like it!

You're spot on about the vertical bars. The nice property this gives is scalability – you'll notice that if you zoom into a deep part of the tree (with the mouse wheel/trackpad) it sort of keeps it's overall shape. The idea is to make it nicer to view wide/deep trees, but I don't really know if that will turn out to be valuable.

About it being misleading, do you mean because Area ∝ Time²? I actually quite like that this view really draws your eye to the important lines, but that may be an acquired taste. Either way, I'm open to tweaking the way heights are calculated, and having an option to use constant heights would be easy enough.

Indicating garbage collection is also a good idea – I think since it's kind of a power user feature it might be good to make it optional, but either way it's definitely something I should do when I get the chance.

[timholy]

That's an interesting point. I can go with that.

This will have to simmer for a couple of days, I've got some traveling to do.