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C++ Object Type Identifier (a.k.a. Type Profiler)

Type Profiler no longer exists, see crbug.com/490464.

Introduction

The C++ Object Type Identifier (a.k.a. Type Profiler) is another profiling feature to find “Which type is the object?". For example, it reports:

"An object at 0x37f3c88 is an instance of std::string."

RTTI is not enough to find a type of an object only from its address [1]. You can try it with the following steps. See the Design Doc if interested.

How to Build with Type Profiler

  1. Edit .gclient to checkout the modified version of Clang.

    solutions = [

    { "name" : "src",

    "url" : "http://git.chromium.org/chromium/src.git",

    ...

    "custom_deps" : {

    ...

    "src/third_party/llvm-allocated-type": "http://src.chromium.org/chrome/trunk/deps/third_party/llvm-allocated-type",

    ...

    },

    ...

    },

    ]

  2. Build Chromium with additional build options. ("clang_type_profiler=1" is the required option.)

    export GYP_DEFINES='clang_type_profiler=1'

    export GYP_GENERATORS='ninja'

    export GYP_GENERATOR_FLAGS='output_dir=out_type_profile'

    gclient runhooks

    ninja -C out_type_profile/Debug -j 16 chrome

How to Use

In a part of Deep Memory Profiler

  1. Run the customized Chromium with Deep Memory Profiler as usual.

  2. Run the dmprof script with a policy label "t0".

    tools/deep_memory_profiler/dmprof csv -p **t0** ~/profile/00-test.12345.0002.heap > ~/profile/00-test.12345.result.csv

Standalone

  1. Run the customized Chromium with TCMalloc's heap-profiler and an environment variable "HEAP_PROFILE_TYPE_STATISTICS=1".

    HEAPPROFILE=/tmp/prefix HEAP_PROFILE_TIME_INTERVAL=20 HEAP_PROFILE_TYPE_STATISTICS=1 out_type_profile/Debug/chrome --no-sandbox

  2. Type statistics "prefix.<pid>.????.type" is dumped with every heap profile dump. It is a classification of all malloc'ed objects by their types. For example, " 13: 520 @ N3WTF5MutexE" means that 13 objects of WTF::Mutex occupy 520 bytes.

    type statistics:

    3739: 841574 @ (no_typeinfo)

    1: 16 @ N3WTF13WTFThreadDataE

    1: 16 @ N3WTF14ThreadSpecificINS_13WTFThreadDataEE4DataE

    ...

    13: 520 @ N3WTF5MutexE

    ...

Looking up from your code

Type Profiler just records mapping from object addresses to their types. You can utilize the mapping by yourself. To use it from your code,

  1. Include third_party/tcmalloc/chromium/src/gperftools/type_profiler_map.h, and
  2. Call LookupType() for object addresses.
    • LookupType() returns const std::type_info& for the object.

References