[eclipse-dev] Finding performance problems

[John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

With today's 3.1 stream integration
build, performance instrumentation has been added to the platform to measure
the duration of certain tasks such as running builders, switching perspectives,
opening and closing views, etc.  When one of these tasks takes longer
than it reasonably should, an error is written to a new performance log
file.  This log is called performance.log and is found in the same
directory as the usual error log.  A performance view can also be
opened to view these performance failures from within the IDE (Show View
-> Other -> Basic -> Performance).  

To gather some initial data on potential
problem areas, we'd like people to run with this performance instrumentation
turned on. After working for awhile (a day or so), attach the resulting
performance.log to the following bug report:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=88096

Eventually performance defects should
be logged directly against the relevant component (the "Blame"
column in the performance view will tell you who was taking the time).
 Keep in mind though that this system is based on heuristics about
how long various tasks should take - so the odd failure showing up is not
a big deal.  It's the consistent patterns of failure that we're looking
for.

What you need to do

To turn on performance instrumentation,
simply run eclipse with the "-debug" command line argument.  This
will automatically pick up the .options file that we have added to this
week's build that enables all platform performance instrumentation.

Further information on using the performance
instrumentation API can be found here:

http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-core-home/documents/3.1/perf_stats.html