Profiling python code with valgrind produces empty log file

edit

Hi all,

I am running 12 ROS nodes (ROS kinetic) and starting the system with a roslaunch file. I would like to profile one of the nodes, while the whol system is running. From my search it seems that I can use valgrind.

I set the roslaunch file as below (as shown here):

<launch>
<param name="use_sim_time" value="true"/>
<arg name="seedval"/>
<param name="seed" value="$(arg seedval)"/>

<group ns="robot1">
<node pkg="pkg_name" name="agent" type="agent.py" launch-prefix="valgrind --tool=callgrind --separate-threads=yes --callgrind-out-file='callgrind.sim1.%p'">
<param name="myID" value="1"/>
......
</node>
</group>

.....
</launch>

I build the package in debug mode like so:

catkin_make -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

Now from what I have read, valgrind will dump the data when the program terminates. And the issue might lie here, because the nodes exit with sys.exit(), raising a SystemExit exception. I have tried adding the --dump-before=function option, but to no avail:

launch-prefix="valgrind --tool=callgrind --dump-before=name_of_function_as_in_script --separate-threads=yes --callgrind-out-file='callgrind.sim1.%p'"

Any ideas, I am not quite sure how to proceed.

Thanks!

hW