How the Visualizer Works

You can use the Visualizer in two ways: you can launch it from within TotalView to visualize data as you debug your programs, and you can run it from a command line to visualize data previously dumped to a file.

Visualizing your program's data is a two step process:

1. You interact with TotalView to choose the data being visualized.
    
2. You interact with the Visualizer to choose how it should display your data.

The TotalView debugger handles the first of these interactions, extracting data and marshalling it into a standard format that it sends down a pipe. The Visualizer then reads the data from this pipe and displays it for analysis. The following figure shows this relationship.  

TotalView Visualizer Connection

You can send data directly from TotalView to the Visualizer while you are debugging your program or you can send data from TotalView directly to a third-party visualizer. If you save visualization data to a file, you can launch the Visualizer from the command line to have it visualize this saved data. The following figure shows these relationships.

TotalView Visualizer Relationships