So if you’ve been doing Mac programming for a while, you’re probably aware that Shark is a tool of veritably godlike omniscience when it comes to profiling your application and finding out just what it is that needs optimization. But were you aware that you can do on-iPhone application profiling with it as well?
Well, maybe you were, but we weren’t. And if you weren’t either, here’s how you do it to get all the source codey goodness of Shark handily:
1) Run your application from within Xcode on the device.
2) Start up Shark (/Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/ is where it lives).
3) Select “Network/iPhone Profiling…” from the Sampling menu.
4) Sort out the resulting dialog as explained here so it looks like this:
Note that this demonstrates Vital Tip #1: Select the particular process of interest, do NOT leave ‘Target’ atthe default of ‘Everything’. We tried that at first, since hey it’d be neat to see the complete list of what’s going on, logged for about 40 seconds … and eleven hours later, it was still chugging away with “Shared devices processing samples” without even having figured out how much work there was to do to get the progress bar started. Yeah, alright then, we won’t do that, will we.
After sorting that out, it’s a matter of a few minutes to get what looks like all the same information from your iPhone app that you can for your desktop apps. It’s amazing what you can find if you just think to actually look, isn’t it now?
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