Evaluating Application Performance in Mac OS X

MacResearch.org published a simple technique for quickly profiling application performance with the Activity Monitor in Mac OS X on Wednesday.

Developers who write commercial applications for Mac OS X will typically use Appleis developer tool, Shark, to profile where an application is spending its time. However, researchers who write their own computational code may want a simpler technique. Dr. Gaurav Khanna, an experienced computational physicist at the University of Massachusetts, well known for his contributions to computation on Macs, posted a tutorial on how to do it.

Briefly, an often overlooked feature of Activity Monitor is used to sample a running application and show how much CPU time each thread is using. Screen shots and a simple explanation are provided. Dr. Khanna says that heis just scratching the surface with this short tutorial, suggesting more to come.