Mastering Delphi Programming: A Complete Reference Guide

Don't guess, measure!

There is only one way to get a good picture about the fast and slow parts of a program—by measuring it. We can do it manually, by inserting time-measuring calls in the code, or we can use specialized tools. We have a name for measuring—profiling—and we call specialized tools for measuring profilers.

In the rest of this chapter, we'll look at different techniques of measuring the execution speed. First we will measure the now familiar program, SlowCode, with a simple software stopwatch and then we'll look at a few open source and commercial profilers.

Before we start, I'd like to point out a few basic rules that apply to all profiling techniques:

• Always profile without the debugger. The debugger will slow the execution ...