Cornichon is a powerful tool you can use to dynamically profile Mac OS X applications on the system and track the process’ performance over time.

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Figure 1: Profiling Safari with Cornichon

Profiling Apple Safari with Cornichon

The Cornichon application includes the ability to:

  • Profile Mac OS X applications
  • Profile iPhone applications running in the iPhone simulator
  • Examine the behavior of one or more processes
  • See the different collected data of a process in real time in a graph
  • Export the data as TAB files that you can later easily import in Apple Numbers or Microsoft Excel

With the Cornichon application, you can inspect different aspects of a process’ behavior:

  • CPU usage
  • Resident memory size (RSIZE)
  • Resident private address space size (RPRVT)
  • Total memory size (VSIZE)
  • Number of threads
  • …

Why using Cornichon?

Apple provides several tools that allow you to profile Mac OS X applications: Activity Monitor, Instruments, and some command line tools like top or ps.

But none of these tools provide a real-time graph to profile a specific application:

  • Activity Monitor has no graph view which makes it difficult to see how the process’ performance evolves over time.
  • The ‘Activity Monitor’ template of Instruments only monitors the system workload but not the workload of a specific application.

Cornichon System Requirements

  • Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later.
  • Universal application (for both Intel and PowerPC-based Macs).

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