Advanced Linux Profiling in a TUI
Authors
Alice Rogers
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As software complexity increases, performance profiling remains an essential practice for identifying CPU bottlenecks and optimizing resource allocation. Flamegraphs (Gregg, B., 2016) have emerged as a near-universal visualization tool for this purpose. The data used to make a flamegraph may be large and is traditionally rendered as a web page or as a GUI component within an IDE. When development is split between a local development machine and a remote cloud server, the need to copy profile data is slow and burdensome.
At the same time, with cloud development being a new normal, there has been a renaissance in using the command line. The command line is well-suited to the new AI chat-based tools (Agarwal et al., 2020). The console for the command line has become richer, supporting broad color palettes and mouse interaction. To use the new rich console environment, Text-based User Interface (TUI) libraries have appeared, mirroring user interface development for modern web applications.
This work presents the combination of advanced profiling with modern TUI design, removing the need to gather remote profile data and analyze it locally. Instead, the tooling can work where the data is, be rich, and support the features that users are accustomed to in traditional web or GUI applications.
Authors
Alice Rogers
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References:
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