The old Windows DE (I didn’t even try this on the UNIX DE) had an interface for using the profiler, but the results window was not very usable (mostly due to the fact that the results window was not resizable, making for a lot of scrolling).

Profiler detail

The profiler in the new Workbench displays the results much better. Not only does it resize, but it also makes a nice use of bars inside the table cells of the report (I believe Excel can do something like this). This makes it easy to pick out the “hot spots” in your code that you want to focus on.

To use the profiler:

  1. Show the profiler view with Window > Show View > Profiler. I keep this on a tab along with the Console, Tasks, Search, and Bookmarks views.
  2. Compile all the code you want to report metrics on.
  3. Turn on the profiler with the Profiler button button.
  4. Run your code.
  5. Go back to the profiler view and hit the button button to get your results. Maximize/resize the view as much as you want! You can also save the results to a file easily (one nitpick: I would prefer a CSV option).

The one oddity is that the bars don’t align, but that’s a minor problem.