Tracing and Optimization

Suggestions to minimize the speed of start-up of addins have been made above. There are two built-in ways to monitor this and investigate the reasons if poor performance is suspected.

Reviewing Addin Start-up Time

Target start-up time for an Addin should be no more than 1 second, if possible. To find out how long your Addin takes to start-up set the following environment variable:

set AVEVA_CAF_TRACING=PERFORMANCE

Output similar to the following will then be displayed in the Console Window:

AVEVA PDMS Design Mk12.1.SP1.0[3430] (WINDOWS-NT 5.1) (5 Nov 2010 : 18:49)

(c) Copyright 1974 to 2010 AVEVA Solutions Limited

Issued to APDian.steele-ukcamsplsNO-TE-St

Loading addins took 0.793 seconds

Starting addin Explorer took 1.108 seconds

Starting addin DrawList took 0.135 seconds

Starting addin MyData took 0.810 seconds

Starting addin History took 0.110 seconds

Starting addin ReferenceList took 0.060 seconds

Starting addin PipeCheck took 0.683 seconds

Starting addin Output took 1.580 seconds

Starting addin Find took 0.343 seconds

Starting addin Links Addin took 0.126 seconds

Starting addin Attributes took 1.015 seconds

Starting addin Status Controller took 0.128 seconds

Total time starting addins 6.098 seconds

Cleared existing tools in 0.009 seconds.

Loading UIC file C:\AVEVA\PDMSEXE\design.uic

Defined new tools in 0.039 seconds.

Loading UIC file C:\AVEVA\PDMSEXE\StatusController.uic

Defined new tools in 0.009 seconds.

Loading UIC file C:\AVEVA\PDMSEXE\CoreSchematicMenu.uic

Defined new tools in 0.008 seconds.

Loading UIC file C:\AVEVA\PDMSEXE\BAS.uic

Defined new tools in 0.000 seconds.

Loading UIC file C:\AVEVA\PDMSEXE\UserDesign.uic

Defined new tools in 0.000 seconds.

Loading XML GUI took 0.068 seconds

Processing UILoaded event tool 0.057 seconds

Loading CommandBar layout took 0.801 seconds

DockManager.LoadFromXML in 1.118 seconds.

Loading Window Layout took 1.119 seconds

Standard PDMS Tracing

The standard facilities found in the classes of the Aveva.Pdms.Utilities.Tracing namespace can be used for tracing performance problems as well as for other general coding investigations.

• The PdmsTrace class gives access to all the facilities of the PDMS trace system and provides a means of outputting general trace messages and values during processing. PdmsTrace functions also enable querying and setting of PDMS trace flags; give access to the current state of the call stack; and allow starting and stopping of CPU time tracing.

• The TraceEntry class provides the means to trace the entry and exit of functions as processing takes place. As the nesting of function calls gets deeper and deeper the function entry messages are indented further and further. Though this output can quickly get verbose it can frequently give evidence of problems in the code - for example functions being called too frequently … or not at all!

To work correctly in C#, TraceEntry needs to know about entry and exit from functions in correct chronological order. There is a difficulty with this in C# because of the way that "garbage collection" works in that language. This means, in particular, it is necessary to ensure that the function exit event occurs at the right moment. This can be achieved by using the Dispose method explicitly:

TraceEntry tr = TraceEntry.Enter("Start", (TraceNumber)101);

// ...

// code being traced ...

// ...

tr.Dispose(); // explicit call on exit

There are still problems with this however as you will need to catch every "return" statement individually. Also the Dispose() method will never be called if an exception occurs. A simpler and more robust way is to do this job using the C# "using" command as follows:

using (TraceEntry tr = TraceEntry.Enter("Start", (TraceNumber)101))

{

// ...

// code being traced ...

// ...

}    // implicit call to Dispose() on exit from the block

// even if there are exceptions or multiple return statements

If you are using these facilities to investigate the start-up of an addin, you will need to set the chosen trace flag from your code:

PdmsTrace.SetTraceFlag((TraceNumber)101, 1);

And, finally, you can use the PDMS CPU time profiling options in conjunction with TraceEntry by using:

PdmsTrace.StartCPUTrace();

// ...

// code being timed ...

// ...

PdmsTrace.StopCPUTrace(true);