Finding Memory Allocation Bottlenecks with FastMM4

Recently, I had to find bottlenecks in one of our applications that does all sorts of things related to DVB and is handling real-time reading and sending of data streams over IP with bitrates up to 80 Mb/s (in our lab; in real life maybe even more). Our customer created a configuration which essentially brought the app to the crawl and I had to fix it.

It quickly turned out that although the program was not able to handle the load, the CPU was not very busy. The busiest core was only using about 30% CPU. So I suspected the thread contention problems in FastMM, switched it for SapMM and indeed - the problem went away. CPU load went up and application could again handle the load.

Crisis averted, I took time to find the real problem - excessive get/freemem calls in this program. As far as I could tell, there existed no tool to find that so in a true DIY manner I created my own ;)

GpProfile on Google code

You may know that lifetime ago I developed fairly successful Delphi profiler called GpProfile.

You may also know that it kinda slipped into oblivion and that it can’t correctly profile modern Delphi code (it is a source instrumenting profile, i.e. it changes your source code so it can be profiled).

You may know all that but I’m fairly sure that you don’t know that GpProfile now works for all Delphis up to XE! How can I be so sure? Because I only learned this a short time ago!

Антон Алисов (Anton Alisov) was brave enough to step in, update the code and create the Google code archive. Go Anton!

In case you’re still using GpProfile (or just want to find out why it was one of most popular Delphi profilers), visit gpprofile2011 project on Google code.