symbol information in Shark

[Robyn]

I am wondering how to get any useful information out of Shark.

When I run it, it just comes up with 'unknown library' for everything related to my code.

In XCode, I have clicked on the target of my file, and I have chosen 'build', and under 'code generation', I have clicked 'generate debug symbols'.

In the general proferences, under 'debugging' I have unclicked 'load symbols lazily'.

Those are the only instructions I could find, with all my googling, for how to get the symbols to show up in the recording, and yet still, nothing happens but a bunch of number addresses and 'unknown library' results. What else do I need to turn on to find out what is taking the time in my program?

I have got the time down significantly, by fixing a few things. But there are still a couple of things that go more slowly that I'd like when loading and when starting a new game. My hunch is that I have some very inefficient methods of looping through things, because this is the first program I've written and I don't really know how to do some things more efficiently. I expect that it might be some places where I used fast enumeration, where I have to go through an array repeatedly looking for a matching value and then sticking it in another array, etc. That sounds like it's something that would be quite inefficient, doesn't it? But I don't know how else to do it, and I don't want to spend ages trying to come up with a better way, if it turns out that that's not the problem after all. So being able to see the actual names of things that are taking the time would be very helpful!

What other settings might there be in XCode that I've missed, that would give me more useful information when I run Shark?

[darren]

did you read through all the apple Shark user guides? Try a search on google such as:

shark unknown library site:apple.com or

shark unknown library iphone

[Robyn]

I read through the guide, but found it mostly incomprehensible at my level. I googled a lot about unknown libraries, but it generally said that it meant that symbol information hadn't been set in XCode, and gave those suggestions for how to set it, which I've tried - and yet I'm still getting nothing to show up beyond 'unknown library'. I followed a couple of tutorials, but they always seemed to get results screens that I'm simply not getting. I don't know if there's some other setting that I've missed somewhere. Or maybe I'm not supposed to be getting anything more specific than that, and I just don't know how to interpret it.

Not only that, but I can't find a way of getting it to monitor start-up time, because I have to have the program running before I can select it.

ETA: nope, been googling more and more, and I still get the same answer: turn on debugging symbols in xCode. And I have.

I don't want to spend ages trying to making something more efficient when it turns out that it's not actually a problem, so it'd be nice to get this to work. But I have mostly changed everything that I know how to change at this stage anyway, so it may be that I just have to leave it loading a bit slowly. It's only a couple of seconds, but I do think it looks weird. I think some of it is that I didn't know a better way to load and restore my data and game state than what I did, which is likely way more roundabout than needed. But I've pretty much got everything working now, and don't want to risk mucking it up!

[Robyn]

There's got to be something I'm missing here. I've tried all the settings I can find to turn on debugging information, and I'm still not getting any results, besides 'unknown library'. I was going to just forget about it, because it seemed to be going reasonable speed on my phone. Then I've just made the disastrous discovery tonight of what it looks like on an older 3G phone, and it's hopeless. My game is unplayably slow. And although I suspect it's something about the graphics and drawing code that is slow (dragging things around the screen is very very sluggish, and all that happens it that they are redrawn), I dno't know exactly where it's slow. And without the symbols, I can't get any more precise information.

Are there any non-obvious settings that I need to change to get the information to show up as other than unknown? anyone had this problem - turning ON debugging symbols, and still getting nothing.

The version that I sent him was the distribution version, following the instructions in the developer guide. I wonder if that still has whatever debugging information in, that could also be slowing it down - even if it's not enough information to actually tell me what is slow. Are there things that I could/should turn off in the release version that might help speed it up?

(to give an idea, the start-up that takes about 1.5 seconds on my phone, takes 6 seconds on his; dragging something around happens in essentially real-time on my phone, and a lag of a second and a bit on his. Etc). It was really shocking how slow it was. I expect that iPod touches will be even slower, as some of them are older yet. All I can think of is that the images are slow to draw, and I can check their size, format, etc. to see if I can speed it up. But I would rather know which methods were taking the time, so that I could concentrate my efforts on them.