I've been playing with
AQTime for a little over 1 week now. All in all, I love it. My company bought 2 licenses because we saw the potential in the product.
Here are the things I like so far:
- Support. The people on their newsgroups are fantastic.
- The GUI. They make liberal use of DevExpress components throughout, and do so quite capably.
- The new Assistant window that helps guide you through the profiling process.
- The samples and documentation.
The things I don't like so far are greater - not necessarily in number, but in quality.
- Leaked Delphi objects are reported as "VCL native memory.N", where N is the number of VCL objects that have been created so far. AQTime 3 reported the actual object name here.
- If you use run-time packages (at least with Delphi 6), AQTime 4 won't show you any leak information. AQTime 3 showed me leak information without fail. According to Atanas, the next version of AQTime 4 should fix this problem.
- In AQTime 3, they used to have a profiler called Reference Count Profiler. This would help you identify bad AddRef/Release lifetimes. The
claim is that AQTime 4 can get by without this, but I'm not sold yet - especially given the first 2 points.
- I have a support issue open trying to get DCOM Server support done properly in AQTime 3.
Now, I realize that I'm just coming up to speed with this product, and this may very well be a case of RTFM and/or learning curve. I reserve the right to move things from the "like" to "don't like" category as I learn more about this very powerful product. But the bottom line is that, for
most of our profiling right now, we are using AQTime 3, as it seems a bit more capable than AQTime 4.
During my perusal of their newsgroup, I noticed a little tidbit that said something to the effect of: AQTime 4 is a new version of AQTime that
merges together the old Unmanaged profilers and the newer .NET profilers. During the effort to get AQTime 4 produced, they understandably looked for ways to improve the product. They probably shared new codebases, consolidated the list of profilers, etc. The combination of all these things means that I'm waiting for patches to AQTime 4 before I can use it to it's fullest extent. I know of Atanas' well-deseverd and excellent reputation in the Delphi community, so I'm not worried that I'll never get what I want. I just hope it's sooner rather than later.