Evaluation

Put simply, flame graphs are a bleeding edge technology that are invaluable tools in the Software Engineer’s toolbox. Understanding flame graphs is simple, but generating them has a varying degree of difficulty depending on the program’s language.

We were very pleased with Flame Graphs. Depending on the language you wish to use, it is easy to install and implement. However, for some languages, it may be more difficult- but this is ultimately something that has to do with the design of the languages rather than Flame Graphs itself. Flame Graphs is very user friendly, with the concepts presented by it easy to understand and interpret. The author of the tool gives alot of help on his website. The learning curve is fairly simple for those that have used similiar flagging tools before. It is fairly self explanatory, but those new to programming may find the information presented to be difficult to interpret. For the most part, it was easy to use considering the obstacles we faced. The end result UI is very good, and without a doubt what makes this tool special. For implementation, the UI varies from language to language, being close to non existent in some.

Our biggest challenge seemed to be finding a program to implement Flame Graphs in! However, this was because it had so many options and was very versatile- meaning we had alot of possibilities to choose from. We believe Flame Graphs could be extremely helpful in not just the workplace, but in education. It brings alot of abstract ideas down to the practical level- very clearly showing concepts discussed in school actually happening. We highly reccomend this program be taught in future versions of this course.

We definitely plan on using Flame Graphs for many future projects in our professional lives. We are already using it to go back and view past projects from school, with interesting results. If asked, we would highly reccomend this tool to anyone with interest in resource control and large scale systems.