The Instruments application is a powerful tool that enables you to collect information about the performance of your application over time. Through the use of the Instruments application, you can gather information based on a variety of different types of data, and view them side-by-side at the same time. This will therefore allow you to spot trends which would be hard to spot otherwise, and this can be used to see code running by your program along with the corresponding memory usage.

The Instruments application comes with a standard library, which you can use to examine various aspects of your code. You can configure Instruments to gather data about the same process or about different processes on the system.

Each instrument collects and displays different types of information relating to file access, memory usage, Network connections, and so on. The following screenshot shows the Instruments application profiling our MapKitExample, using a number of different...