Jinsight Reference Manual

Execution Pattern View

Purpose · Elements

Reference Pattern View

Purpose

Elements

Main View

After the user selects a starting set of method invocations, this view displays a tree summarizing the calls made by those method invocations. The first line in the view shows the starting set of invocations (the root of the tree), and will either show a method name, or the phrase "various methods," if we selected invocations from more than one method as the starting set. Each row shows the cumulative time contribution and number of calls of a group of method invocations represented by that row. The contribution % column by default measures the cumulative time the invocations in a given row contributed to the cumulative time in the starting set of invocations shown in the first row.

To use this view, you may want to first select a method or group or invocations from another view, and then open the Call Tree view. You can also open the Call Tree and request to see all activity in a particular thread. There are other ways to set the starting set of invocations described below.

By default, the tree is formed by grouping invocations of the same method together at each level. Unlike the Execution Pattern view, grouping is done without regard for the sequence of calls at each level. Each row is colored according to the class of the method shown in that row.

By default the call tree shows callees, but it can also show the tree of callers leading to a starting set of invocations. In this case, each row measures activity in the root invocations (i.e. those shown in the first row) that this row is responsible for causing. Each row will show % of root time, time in root, and number of root calls that were the result of the call path starting at that row.

The user can also choose to group invocations at each level by class or by slice, to see a more coarse-grained summary.

A row will be highlighted in yellow if at least one of the method invocations it represents is currently selected in any view.

Menus

• Popup menus. Right-clicking on a row selects that set of invocations, and presents a popup menu. Drill Down from Selected Items lets you open a view that is restricted to the current selections. Create a New Slice will create one or more new slices from the current selections. You can create either a single slice From Selected Items or one slice For Each Selected Item. Choosing Limit an Existing Slice presents the set of execution slices you can choose to limit to Selected Items.

 
• File menu. The tabular data in the view can be saved by selecting Export to File, which writes the call tree view contents to a text file in a comma-separated value format. The default file type is .csv, which is recognized by popular spreadsheet programs. The file will contain the currently expanded rows of the call tree.

  Select Close to close the window showing this call tree view.

• Start with menu. This menu controls the starting set of invocations, represented in the view title and the first line in the view. Start with thread lets you select a thread, to summarize the activity beginning at the highest-level method invocation in that thread. Clicking on Start with current selection (now) updates the view to show call tree information for the current set of invocations. The other option, Start with current selection (live), is a toggle. When on, the view will automatically update itself to use a new starting set of invocations whenever the user makes new selections in any view.

  Alternatively, the option Start with all elements in slice presents a set of execution slices you can choose from to set the starting set of invocations.

• Tree menu. This menu controls the data shown in the remainder of the view. Show callees of the starting set is the default view. If instead Show callers is chosen, the tree displays calls made to the starting set of invocations.

  The contribution percentage value shown on each line of the call tree is normally set to Measure percent from root, that is, the percentage value relative to the contribution of the entire starting set of invocations. If this toggle is set off, then the percentage value is relative merely to that of the next node up on the tree. Show short names of methods is another default, which shortens the length of the method name by omitting the package name portion and the method argument information. The option Expand/collapse to depth may be used to expand or collapse the entire tree to the depth specified; 3 is the default depth of the tree.

  Each node of the call tree is a grouping of method invocations. By default each node is Grouped by method and colored by class. The user can also Group by class, coalescing (at each tree level) method calls in the same class into a single class node. Group by Slice coalesces (at each tree level) method calls in the same slice into a single slice node, and the node coloring is then according to slice.

  The default sorting for nodes at the same tree level is to Sort by cumulative time contribution, in descending order. It is also possible to Sort by name nodes at the same tree level.
   

• Selected menu. These options are active only when current selection(s) exist. Drill Down from Selected Items lets you open a view that is restricted to the current selections. Create a New Slice will create one or more new slices from the current selections. You can create either a single slice From Selected Items or one slice For Each Selected Item. Choosing Limit an Existing Slice presents the set of execution slices you can choose to limit to Selected Items.
   
• Help menu. Selecting Help in a view attempts to use your browser to display the Reference Manual documentation for that view. The browser program location is specified in the environment variable JINSIGHT_BROWSER, in the shell script named jinsight that invokes the visualizer.

See also Using Slices in the Call Tree View for a detailed discussion of how this view works with slices and workspaces.

Execution Pattern View

Jinsight Home

Reference Pattern View