[Kstars-devel] Binary star data loading accomplished in Branch!

[Andrew Buck]

> > Another reason could be that these time tests were performed in a
> > very coarse manner, where I started the two processes "together" (by
> > putting one as sleep 10; ...branch.../kstars and the other as
> > ..trunk.../kstars and then firing the second one ten seconds late).
> > Probably somebody could do a more professional timing test which I
> > don't know how to do.
> 
> There is timing code in skymapevents.cpp that you can copy.  It looks 
> like this:
> 
>    QTime t;
>    t.start();
>    ... do something ...
>    kDebug() << QString("Something took %1 ms").arg(t.elapsed());

Another possibiltiy is the unix "time" program.  You just run "time
kstars" and when the program finishes execution it will spit out total
runtime and a couple other numbers, see "man time" for details.  Another
helpful trick is to profile the code.  Just edit the makefile to include
the -pg option to the compiler and linker and then build and run your
program normally.  When it is done running there should be a file called
"gmon.out" located either in the current directory or in the directory
where kstars is located, I think it will be the latter.  The gmon.out
file can then be parsed by running "gprof kstars gmon.out | less" which
will tell you exactly what functions were called, how many times, how
long they took, etc.  Just as a side note though, I have tried running
this myself and have gotten some strange results with it, I think the
way KStars is built creates some kind of issue with the profiling.  Does
anyone know if there actually more than one binary file built or
something like that?

-Buck