Managing Profiler Overhead

The profiler collects information in events that describe the operations it displays. It takes a small amount of time and memory for TestStand to store a profiler event. However, if you profile sequences that execute large numbers of steps that run very quickly and you do not limit the events that the profiler collects, the profiler can collect a number of events large enough to consume a significant amount of time and memory. The number of events the profiler can collect before the effect on performance becomes problematic is system dependent.

If you collect more profiling data than your system can acceptably process, you can do the following to improve performance:

  • Hide Selected Categories of Data—You can hide selected categories of data using the options in the View menu. Hiding large numbers of events improves the performance of the profiler window, but is less beneficial than reducing the amount of data collected.
  • Reduce and/or Limit the Amount of Data—You can control the amount of data the profiler collects using the options in the Configure Data Collection dialog box. This is the most effective option for improving performance.
  • Disable Profiler Display Updates—You can disable the Update Display button while collecting data. This has a small effect, but can reduce the amount that the operation of the profiler displays impacts the timestamps of the collected events, especially if the profiled operations consume all of the available cpu cores such that the profiler window must share a core with profiled operations.