[sakras]

Instruments is not nearly good enough for any serious performance work. Instruments only tells me what percent of time is spent in which part of the code. This is fine for a first pass, but it doesn’t tell me _why_ something is slow. I really need a V-Tune-like profiler on macOS.

[saagarjha]

I’ve used it professionally and generally been happy with it. What are you missing from it?

[sakras]

I’ve tried to use it professionally, but always end up switching to my x86 desktop to profile my code, just so I can use V-Tune.

It’s missing any kind of deeper statistics such as memory bandwidth, cache misses, branch mispredictions, etc. I think fundamentally Apple is geared towards application development, whereas I’m working on more HPC-like things.

[saagarjha]

Have you tried using the performance counters? They've been useful in my experience, although I don't touch them often. Instruments is definitely not geared towards this since most application developers rarely need to do profiling at this level, but it has some level of this built in when you need it.