Profiling: Time Stamp Documentation

The purpose of this document is to give those of us who write filters for post-processing and analysis of profiling log files an overview over the available time stamps and their meaning. The documentation should enable us to write a filter which extracts only those time stamps from a log file that belong to a specific task say for example the loading of a writer document in XML format.

Don't include a description of every time stamp into this document.

Format

The description of a time stamp should include the following information:

1. A (very) short description that serves as a title.

2. The line that is written to the logfile (that part of it that follows time and threadid of course). Be very carefull with this because it is used in regular expressions to match the time stamps in the log files. In time stamps that are emitted on entering and leaving a function or other scope replace the opening or closing curly brackets by a set of both (and include such time stamps only once).

3. A description that tells the filter writer what happens in the function that is bracketed with the time stamp(s) in question, resp. what a message time stamp tells you.

4. Whatever information you think would be helpfull to the filter writer.

Example

Look at the following table taken from the chart project for an example of what time stamp descriptions might look like. Here sch is the name of the project (chart) and af is the author short

Project	Short description	Time stamp	Description
Sch (Chart)	Main function of the chart.	{} sch (af119097) ::ChartModel::BuildChart	BuildChart is the method that does most of the work in creating a chart and consumes most of the time. It is called mutch to often.
	Build chart not skipped	{} sch (af119097) ::ChartModel::BuildChart : {} full	Indication that due to a lock of the model the build chart has not been skipped.
	Loading of a chart	{} sch (af119097) ::SchChartDocShell::Load	Loading of a chart object.
	Chart is loaded from XML format	| sch (af119097) ::SchChartDocShell::Load : XML Format	Chart is loaded from an XML storage.
	Chart is loaded from binary format	| sch (af119097) ::SchChartDocShell::Load : Binary Format	Chart is loaded from a binary storage.