Using ABAP Profiling – the ABAP Trace

Prerequisites

The ABAP Trace is not available if you are working with a back end system at Release 7.0 EHP3. Use transaction SAT in the embedded GUI if you need to trace an ABAP program under SAP NetWeaver 7.0 EHP3.

Context

You can use ABAP profiling to do the following:

Analyze the performance of your ABAP application. You can identify performance hot spots, where you might want to concentrate your re-factoring effort.
Analyze the flow of your ABAP program. If you need to analyze or compare program flow, the ABAP Trace can be a faster and more effective tool to use than the ABAP Debugger.

The ABAP Trace is based on the technology of the ABAP Runtime Analysis, transaction SAT.

Note

New measurement infrastructure and tools

The ABAP Trace in ABAP Development Tools processes raw measurement data differently than the ABAP Runtime Analysis (Transaction SAT) and offers different tools than the Runtime Analysis in the ABAP back end.

Because of the difference in processing raw performance data, you cannot compare the run times reported in ABAP Trace in ABAP Development Tools with those reported in transaction SAT.

Legacy tools

For some purposes, you may still wish to use the standard analysis tools in transaction SAT in the embedded SAP GUI. SAT offers several legacy tools that are not yet offered in the ABAP Development Tools:

The Profile, which allows you to view the performance data of the trace along various dimensions, and helps you to find performance hot spots.
The Statement Trace, which lists trace events sequentially in the order of their occurrence, together with information as to the hierarchical level of each entry. The advantage of the statement trace is that you can quickly search for events, inspect them, and find their position in other tools.
The Critical Processing Blocks function in the Module Tree. The data in the Module Tree is also shown in the ADT Call Tree. But with the Critical Processing Blocks function you can quickly scan the call hierarchy for method or function module calls or other processing blocks that exceed processing time limits and therefore are performance 'hot spots'.
The Database Tables tool, which shows you the database tables accessed during a trace. You can jump from a table to the code locations where it is used.
The Times tool, which aggregates the run time consumed according to the trace events recorded in the trace.

The run times shown in the legacy tools are not as accurate as the ones shown in the new ABAP Trace. However, proportions of the run times in the legacy tools are accurate. You can therefore still use the tools to compare run times within a trace and to supplement the ABAP Trace in ABAP Developer Tools.

You can open a trace in the legacy tools and view the raw trace file by choosing Start of the navigation path Other Next navigation step Display in SAT End of the navigation path or Other Display Trace File .