| Subject: | Option to force NYTProf to survive truncation |
During a significant production performance event yesterday, we
attempted to diagnose the problem by replicating the production dataset
to a test environment and running the same code (a batch-mode
application) for the previous and current releases under NYTProf.
Since the size of the performance problem was 2 orders of magnitude
(someone allowed an O(n^2) to slip into some ancillary code) it should
have been easy to find the problem with only a minute or two out of the
2 hour batch run.
However, we encountered problems with nytprofhtml during this process,
because the mechanism by which we aborted the batch result seemed to
result in an immediate exit that somehow failed to cleanup properly.
Despite having all of the data from the run, nytprofhtml refused to
generate the report because the file was "truncated".
In many scenarios, this kind of thing is actually likely. NYTProf runs
on applications that end with a segfault or some other kind of failure,
for example.
If there is any way to allow it, we would greatly appreciate some kind
of --force style option that tells NYTProf to NOT fail on truncated dump
files, and at least make a "best guess" of how the program ended.
If it can survive unclean exits up to and including a seg fault or hard
power failure, that would be awesome.