Profilerpedia: Software Profiling Tool Catalog

Profilerpedia is a catalog of Profilers, Profiler Data Formats they output, the UIs that can analyse/visualise those data formats, and data format converters.

See the announcement blog post.

This is an attempt to map the software profiling ecosystem. A literature review / survey of profilers, their data formats, UIs, and converters.

I started this database for myself when trying to find good visualisation tools for complex Android performance problems, and published it publicly figuring it might be useful to other performance engineers.

Please file an issue or leave comments on the source spreadsheet where I’ve missed anything and I will update this.

Prior Art / Similar efforts:

• Wikipedia: List of performance analysis tools
• Wikipedia: Category:Profilers
• D. Maplesden, E. Tempero, J. Hosking and J. C. Grundy, “Performance Analysis for Object-Oriented Software: A Systematic Mapping,” in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 41, no. 7, pp. 691-710, 1 July 2015, doi: 10.1109/TSE.2015.2396514.
• Okanović D., van Hoorn A., Heger C., Wert A., Siegl S. (2016) Towards Performance Tooling Interoperability: An Open Format for Representing Execution Traces. In: Fiems D., Paolieri M., Platis A. (eds) Computer Performance Engineering. EPEW 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 9951. Springer, Cham.
• Virtual Institute - High Productivity Supercomputing maintains a Tool Guide of profiling and debugging tools, mainly focusing on supercomputers.

Statistics

Profilerpedia maps and connects:

• 240 Profilers
• 162 Data Formats
• 129 Converters
• 152 Analysis UIs

Starred Profilers

• bcc profile.py ⭐
• Chrome DevTools ⭐
• Go CPU Profiler ⭐
• Instruments.app ⭐
• Linux perf record ⭐
• py-spy ⭐
• rbspy ⭐
• Simpleperf ⭐
• Visual Studio ⭐

Starred Formats

• callgrind ⭐
• Event Tracing for Windows ⭐
• Folded Stacks ⭐
• Gecko Profile ⭐
• Java hprof ⭐
• Linux perf script ⭐
• Linux perf.data ⭐
• Perfetto Trace ⭐
• pprof ⭐
• Simpleperf perf.data ⭐
• Speedscope ⭐
• Trace Event Format ⭐

Starred Analysis UIs

• Chrome Performance ⭐
• d3-flamegraph ⭐
• Firefox Profiler ⭐
• flamegraph ⭐
• Perfetto ⭐
• Pprof web ⭐
• pprof.me ⭐
• Speedscope ⭐