Profiling the memory in D

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 12/4/19 3:10 AM, Erdem wrote:
> I am used to have cool tools like valgrid massif to visualize the memory 
> usage from C++ but in D it seems I am blind folded looking for the problem.
> 
> Until now I tried:
> 
> --vgc option which show million things which makes it not useful
> --build=profile-gc
> which seems to slow down my program like *200 times and I have some 
> operation depending on time which makes creating the real case of the 
> application impossible. The observation itself effect the experiment 
> very badly.
> 
> Since this options are not useful for me, I tried to put debug logs in 
> critical places to estimate where I am losing memory. I couldn't find a 
> D native call to get the memory usage of the program. I had to call a 
> shell command which also slows down the app. This slow down causes me to 
> not be able to put this debug log too many places or in critical loops.
> 
> I manage to narrow it down a bit. Than I wanted to check the object 
> instances to find out which objects are getting bigger. I tried
> GC.sizeOf(&object) which always prints 0. GC.sizeOf also does not works 
> with associative arrays , I don't see any usefull case than 
> GC.sizeOf(array.ptr).
> 
> That is the background of my questions and my questions are:
> 
> Is there a better way to visualize the memory in D something like 
> valgrid massif?
> 
> profile-gc literally makes to program not do anything due to slow down 
> is there any way to profile-gc in a faster fashion?
> 
> Is there a native function which will return the memory usage of my 
> program?

If it's total GC memory only you are interested in, then try the D 
runtime switch for the GC: --DRT-gcopt=profile:1

This will print out a summary of GC usage at the end of your program, 
and shouldn't significantly affect runtime.

> 
> Is there a function to return sizes of AAs and even class instances ?
> 

Class instances have a compiler-defined size. Try 
__traits(classInstanceSize, SomeClass)

This is the compile-time size of that specific type. If you have a class 
instance, and you want the actual class size, in the case of a derived 
instance, you may retrieve that using 
typeid(classInstance).initializer.length.

Note also that this is not necessarily the size consumed from the GC! If 
you want *that* size, you need to use GC.sizeof(cast(void*)object) (you 
were almost correct, what you did was get the GC size of the *class 
reference* which is really a pointer, and really lives on the stack, 
hence the 0).

-Steve