Profilers and Memory Debuggers - Mon, 13 Oct 2008

I used two tools with Delphi 4 to help optimize Behold and check for memory leaks.

GpProfile by Primoz Gabrijelcic (hence the Gp) was a free profiler for Delphi 2, 3, 4 and 5. I used it quite a bit for optimizing Behold and especially the guts of TRichView. Many of the improvements I found for TRichView I gave to Sergey and were included in later versions of it.

By the end of 2000, GpProfile was no longer supported. It worked for me up to now, since I was still using Delphi 4. But I don’t trust it to work with Delphi 2009. So I need something else.

The tool I used to optimize memory and look for leaks was Memory Sleuth by TurboPower. When I got it 10 years ago, it was free. They later came out with Version 2 and Version 3 and by then were charging $349 US for it. I never upgraded, since what it did in the early free version worked well enough for me. But that whole company closed in 2003 and they made most of their programs OpenSource. I don’t think MemorySleuth was one of them and it is now a relic as well.

So I will need something new that works with Delphi 2009. For profilers, I can only seem to find two. One is ProDelphi. It doesn’t look bad and I’d need the professional version which costs 57.5 Euros (or about $80 US). The other is AQtime by AutomatedQA, and I’ll talk about that in a moment.

For memory debuggers, there’s one that stands out. It’s MemProof by Atanas Soyanov and it’s free. Just one problem. It was bought out by AutomatedQA. They made it available free for awhile, but last year they took MemProof off their website and integrated all its functionality into AQtime.

The good thing about AQtime is that it is apparently a fantastic product. It has won Delphi best software awards for several years and the integration with Delphi and capabilities seem amazing. The bad thing is that it will cost me $599 US and the Canadian dollar has just dipped 15% in the last month (ouch). That’s almost as much as the full version of Delphi 2009 costs.

But looking at AQtime, and looking at my plans and my optimization needs for Behold, I expect I will go for the 30 day download trial once I begin that task, and after 30 days then decide whether to purchase it. I expect that I will.

I am looking forward to seeing what amazing things it will do for Behold once I start optimizing the new core of TRichView, Virtual Treeview, and the implementation of the DISQLite3 database package.