On Thu, 17 Feb 2022, Jörg Belger wrote:

> Funny, I commented out some things (red) in #open:forWrite:. Now the profiler is telling me that „String new: 1“ tools 97.4%… Really? Or is this a profiler bug?

It's a limitation of the profiler. That profiler uses sampling and is 
implemented entirely in Smalltalk, so it can only measure message sends.

What happens with your code is that after the #asVmPathName send a 
primitive is invoked (#primOpen:writable:), and that is not a real message 
send.
Then inlined code comes (#ifNil:), which is also not a send.
Then assignments come which are also not sends.
The first actual send is String >> #new:.
So, the profiler will count everything that happend before that send 
and after #asVmPathName towards String >> #new:, which is why you see such 
high number there.

Since you know that String >> #new: with argument 1 is not expected to 
take too long, and the same applies to #ifNil: and the assignments, you 
can be sure that the time is spent in #primOpen:writable:, which is 
primitiveFileOpen in FilePlugin. And that is known to be quite slow on 
Windows presumably due to anti-virus measures.


Levente