EasyView: Bringing Performance Profiles into Integrated Development Environments

Dynamic program performance analysis (also known as profiling) is well-known for its powerful capabilities of identifying performance inefficiencies in software packages. Although a large number of profiling techniques are developed in academia and industry, very few of them are widely used by software developers in their regular software developing activities. There are three major reasons. First, the profiling tools (also known as profilers) are disjoint from the coding environments such as IDEs and editors; frequently switching focus between them significantly complicates the entire cycle of software development. Second, mastering various tools to interpret their analysis results requires substantial efforts; even worse, many tools have their own design of graphical user interfaces (GUI) for data presentation, which steepens the learning curves. Third, most existing profilers expose few interfaces to support user-defined analysis, which makes the tools less customizable to fulfill diverse user demands. We develop EasyView, a general solution to integrate the interpretation and visualization of various profiling results in the coding environments, which bridges software developers closer with profilers during the code development cycle. The novelty of EasyView lies in its significant improvement on the usability of profilers. EasyView not only provides deep insights to support intuitive analysis and optimization in a simple interface, but also enhances user experiences in using the profilers effectively and efficiently in the IDEs. Our evaluation shows that EasyView is able to support various profilers for different languages and provide unique insights into performance inefficiencies in different domains. Our user studies show that EasyView can largely improve the usability of profilers in software development cycles via facilitating performance debugging efforts.