15. Application preferences

To display the Preferences dialog, select Preferences from the menu, or press the Ctrl/Command + , keys.

You can reset your preferences at any time by selecting Reset Preferences from the Help menu.

15.1. Setting the colour theme

The Graph Analyser supports light and dark colour themes. There are three options:

• Auto: (default) Allows the application to follow your machine’s system-wide theme setting for light or dark mode. If the Graph Analyser application detects a change in your operating system theme, it automatically switches to the corresponding mode.

• Light: Forces the Graph Analyser application into light mode, irrespective of your machine’s theme settings.

• Dark: Forces the Graph Analyser application into dark mode, irrespective of your machine’s theme settings.

15.2. SSH preferences

You can store your SSH preferences in the Preferences dialog to allow authorisation when opening reports on remote machines. There are two settings you can enter here:

• SSH private key path: Enter the file path of your your machine’s private SSH key here. This filepath will be used to authenticate you on remote machines during the connection process. The default path is <home>/.ssh/id_rsa/, where <home> denotes your home directory in your operating system.

• SSH agent mode: Drop-down-list to choose whether you want to specify an SSH agent socket path, and, if so, how you want to do so:

  • Disabled: Do not use an SSH agent socket (the default)

  • Manually specify: Enter file path to the SSH agent socket in the box that appears below this option.

  • Automatically obtain from environment: Obtain the SSH agent path from an environment variable.

15.3. Menu close delay

Drop-down menus allow you to select one (in the case of radio buttons) or several (in the case of checkboxes) values from a list which appears when you click a menubar button. This preference defines how long (in milliseconds) you want the menu to be visible after you move your mouse away from it.

15.4. Scroll behaviour

This option sets the default behaviour for your mouse’s scroll wheel (or using two-finger drag on a laptop trackpad). You can choose either:

• Scroll by default where the mouse wheel will scroll the window content up and down. Holding down Ctrl/Command while using the scroll wheel then zooms the window content in and out.

• Zoom by default where the mouse wheel zooms the window content in and out. Holding down Ctrl/Command while using the scroll wheel then scrolls the window content up and down.

15.5. Show help links

By default, Help links are enabled for the application. These links appear in tooltips when you hover over various parts of the reports, including buttons, text boxes and tabs. Hovering your mouse over them for a second presents you with a tooltip, which contains a link to the section of the in-app help that corresponds to that part of the report.

You can disable the help links, and prevent them appearing, by switching off this option.

15.6. Quit after last window is closed

This controls whether the Mac version of the application quits the program after the last window is closed.

15.7. Experimental features

Each version of the Graph Analyser contains some experimental features that are hidden by default. These features are not fully release-capable, and will have limited support and may change or be removed in future. You can enable them here.

15.8. Byte units

This allows you to choose which memory unit and prefix you’d like to use across the application. All figures denoting memory usage will then use that format, making it easier to compare figures across reports.

The options displayed are for a memory size of 1,024 bytes, so you can choose to display:

• Binary multiples (1.0 KiB): Display in base 2 format (1KiB = 1,024 bytes),

• SI prefixes (1.0 kB): Display in SI units (1kB = 1,000 bytes),

• Bytes only (1,024 B): Display in bytes only

The only exception to this setting is the file browser, where SI prefixes are always used, in accordance with convention.

15.9. Show graph stats

You can display (or hide) statistics for the Memory and Liveness reports. They appear in the top right-hand corner of the graph and show the Average, Minimum, Maximum and Standard Deviation of the memory usage across the selected tiles, for each data set plotted.

You can move this statistics box anywhere in your graph by dragging its title bar at the top.

15.10. Stack graph values

• When this option is turned on, the values shown in the tooltips on the memory graph are displayed stacked

• When turned off, the individual values are shown without stacking.

When this option is turned on, (stacked) is displayed in the tooltip.

15.11. Send telemetry

When you first install one of the PopVision® tools, you will be asked for your consent for Graphcore to collect telemetry information that helps improve the application and monitor performance. Your response to this dialog is stored in your preferences, and you can turn telemetry on or off with this option.

See Telemetry consent for full details.

15.12. Software update

You can choose to allow the Graph Analyser to periodically check for updates. Note that you also have the opportunity to set this preference on the EULA splash-screen, when it first appears.

If a new update is found, you can either download and install it now (a restart of the app will install it), or you can delay it until later. You can also choose to check manually by selecting Check For Updates… from the File menu.

Sometimes, network issues may cause a download to take too long to finish, in which case a dialog is displayed that allows you to cancel the current download, and retry later.