August 2011
Intermediate to advanced
552 pages
23h 48m
English
Mac OS X comes with a number of command-line tools for tracking down particular types of performance problems. The nice thing about the command line is that you can remotely log into a machine and watch things as they happen. They also don’t interfere with your application’s user interface.
The simplest tool is time. It times command execution and shows you clock time, CPU time in userspace, and CPU time spent in the kernel. Here is a run of /usr/bin/time on TextEdit. The time measured was the time starting TextEdit up, loading /usr/share/dict/words, and then scrolling from the top to the bottom.
$ time /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit real ...Read now
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