Using Firefly Profiler

Firefly provides a Profiler tool which helps to analyze the application execution and find issue and performance bottlenecks.

  1. Starting the Profiler
    While the application is open, Right-Click on the status bar:
    Developer Tools -> Profiler -> Click Start Profiling, or use Ctrl+Shift+P

Run a process you would like to observe.

  1. End the Profiler Once the process is done, click End Profiling in the toolbar menu or Ctrl+Shift+P again

  1. Reviewing the Profiler results
    Clicking End Profiling will open the results window.

Let’s observe the results:

  1. The process total elapsed time is 635 ms (1)
  2. The order of the Profiler result is based on the processing time (in ascending order). In our case we can see that the longest processing time is 278 ms (43.76% of the entire process) which was spent inside OnLeaveRow() and was called 830 times. (2)
  3. Profiler Colors:
    • Black – Code Information
    • Brown – Code related to the database
    • Red – Code Exception
  4. There is a Relation to table Customers. There were 830 SQL calls to the database and we can see that each query was sent several times to the database. (3)
    This stems from the cache option which was not set to TRUE.
    Setting the cache to TRUE for the Customers model will reduce the number of calls dramatically and improve the performance.

Running the same process again we can see the database access to the Customers table has been decreased significantly.

  1. The processing time of the Customers table access was reduced to 19 ms from 114ms – an 83% improvement.
  2. There were only 89 SQL calls to the database instead of 830!
  3. The Relation for each Customer occurred only once.

  1. Reviewing the Profiler options
    Right-Click on the results screen will bring a context menu with 6 options:

    • Details – You can Right-Click on any line to see the information such the actual SQL statement and the program path. You can also click Enter or hover above the line to see the details (4)
    • Copy Path – While parking on a controler or event, you can copy the code path to ease the search using the "Go To All" in Visual Studio . (e.g Northwind.Customers.ShowCustomers.OnLoad())
    • Statistics - This will provide statistics for a specific phase such as, how many times the taks it being called in this process
    • Save – You can save the profiler result to a file.
    • Large Fonts – Will enlarge the fonts on the results screen
    • Search

  2. Open saved Profiler file

  1. Profiler settings in the INI
    To use the profiler for the Web or without using Developer tools, Simply add an entry to the INI file in the [MAGIC_ENV] section:

     Profiler= c:\temp\myfile.prof

Or as an argumant from the command line:

    /Profiler= *c:\temp\myfile.prof

Notice that a Profiler for the Web will create a file for each request.

  1. Profiler for Parallel programs
    To start profiling parallel context stand on the window of the context you would like to debug and press Ctrl+Shift+P, that will start profiling. To end profiling press Ctrl+Shift+P again.

The Profiler is part of the migrated solution but you can also download it from here: http://doc.fireflymigration.com/fireflyprofiler.html

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or email us at info@fireflymigration.com