What is gprof used for?

Gprof is a performance analysis tool used to profile applications to determine where time is spent during program execution. Gprof is included with most Unix/Linux implementations, is simple to use, and can quickly show which parts of an application take the most time (hotspots).

What is gprof in Linux?

gprof produces an execution profile of C, Pascal, or Fortran77 programs. If more than one profile file is specified, the gprof output shows the sum of the profile information in the given profile files. Gprof calculates the amount of time spent in each routine.

What is gprof command?

On Unix-like operating systems, the gprof command is a software developement tool that displays call graph profile data of a compiled binary.

What is profiling in GCC?

Profiling is an important aspect of software programming. Through profiling one can determine the parts in program code that are time consuming and need to be re-written. This helps make your program execution faster which is always desired.

How accurate is Gprof?

They are completely accurate and will not vary from run to run if your program is deterministic. The sampling period that is printed at the beginning of the flat profile says how often samples are taken. The rule of thumb is that a run-time figure is accurate if it is considerably bigger than the sampling period.

How does Gprof generate a performance profile of an application?

GPROF output consists of two parts: the flat profile and the call graph. The flat profile gives the total execution time spent in each function and its percentage of the total running time. There is an external tool called gprof2dot capable of converting the call graph from gprof into graphical form.

How accurate is gprof?

How does gprof generate a performance profile of an application?

How do I use gprof profiler?

Profiling has several steps:

1. You must compile and link your program with profiling enabled. See section Compiling a Program for Profiling.
2. You must execute your program to generate a profile data file. See section Executing the Program.
3. You must run gprof to analyze the profile data. See section gprof Command Summary.

Is Gprof open source?

Code Profiling in Linux Using Gprof – Open Source For You.

How do I know if Gprof is installed?

To check that gprof is installed properly, execute the gprof command and it should give some error like ‘a. out: No such file or directory’. Assuming that the compiler being used it gcc or cc, compile your code with the option ‘-pg’ so that the executable includes extra code for profiling purposes.

What is the difference between flat profile and call graph in the output generated by gprof?

The flat profile is the most useful output table in line-by-line mode. The call graph isn’t as useful as normal, since the current version of gprof does not propagate call graph arcs from source code lines to the enclosing function.

What is GNU profiling and why do you need it?

In very large projects, profiling can save your day by not only determining the parts in your program which are slower in execution than expected but also can help you find many other statistics through which many potential bugs can be spotted and sorted out. In this article, we will explore the GNU profiling tool ‘gprof’.

What is gprof?

] gprof produces an execution profile of C, Pascal, or Fortran77 programs. The effect of called routines is incorporated in the profile of each caller. The profile data is taken from the call graph profile file ( gmon.out default) which is created by programs that are compiled with the -pg option of cc, pc, and f77 .

How do I run gprof to interpret profile data?

After you have a profile data file `gmon.out’, you can run gprof to interpret the information in it. The gprof program prints a flat profile and a call graph on standard output. Typically you would redirect the output of gprof into a file with `>’ . You run gprof like this: Here square-brackets indicate optional arguments.

How does GNU gprof read a file?

When reading a file, GNU gprof will ensure records of the same type are compatible with each other and compute the union of all records. For example, for basic-block execution counts, the union is simply the sum of all execution counts for each basic-block.