Best ways to analyze application performance?

[Clemens Eisserer]

Thank you very much for your help!

> Something
> like this is highly needed and will be *much* appreciated. The user
> interfaces for X can benefit significantly from such analysis as there is
> definitely a lot of room for improvement there.
I especially thought about OpenOffice and very especially about GTK2.
I don't know what they changed but since the switch from gtk1.2 ->
gtk2 gtk's performance did't recover at all.
Even applications that are just based on GTK (Mozilla, Thunderbird)
showed a siginificant slower performance after they switched to gtk2.
I just can't imaging that this is just bexcause of the use of
client-side fonts...

Well, I thought there must be spacial tools for measuring X11
application performance - since otherwise its really hard to track
down where performance is wasted. To run an application synchronous
also does destroy performance data since the application does perform
completly different in this mode (simple operations take MUCH more
time).
Maybe this could be one of the reasons why X11 based applications have
the reputation of being slow :-( ?
This means I have to struggle with oprofile, maybe it could help to
profile xlib directly?

On the other hand if someone would create such a tool what should it measure:
* How long operations take on server-side
* Number of context-switches and when they occured (triggerd by which operation)
* Number and type of operations on client-side
* ???
any ideas what I forgot?

Another thing which would be interresting - does anybody performance
tips or tutorials for X11/Xorg?

Thank you in advance, lg Clemens