Profilers
Linux systems count with a wide variety of profilers each of with their pros and cons, there is no magic bullet, it's recommended to use more than one tool when analyzing your application, I recommend you to use at least OProfile and Valgrind.
Contents
OProfile
OProfile is a non-obtrusive system-wide profiler for Linux, it can use system's performance counters to give you insights on where to optimize your code.
Helper script for simple runs (remember to run opcontrol --setup ...
once before this script):
#!/bin/sh sudo opcontrol --init sudo opcontrol --start sudo opcontrol --dump sudo opcontrol --reset $@ sudo opcontrol --stop opreport --symbols > oprof.txt
see also oprof_start
User Interfaces
oprof_start
Qt3 GUI for OProfile, ships in official distribution, see http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/doc/oprofile-gui.html
KCachegrind
One can use reports that are usable by kcachegrind with (for more instruction see http://docs.kde.org/kde3/en/kdesdk/kcachegrind/using-kcachegrind.html):
opreport -gdf | op2callgrind
OProfileUI
Another useful application is OProfileUI, it provides a GTK+2 user interface to run and show statistics, including basic call graph.
Documentation
In depth explanation can be found at:
Caveats
- JFFS2 does not provide OProfile requirements, running OProfile to output data into JFFS2 partition will fail, instead use a ramfs or some external card with ext2/3:
mkdir /var/lib/oprofile # ram mount -t ramfs none /var/lib/oprofile # ext3 mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /var/lib/oprofile
- settings event counter too low or too high may hang your test machine. Check the recommended value for each event on specific platforms.
GProf
Unlike OProfile, GProf requires applications to be compiled with special flag -pg
so compiler will introduce marks in generated binary to measure runs. After run the gmon.out
file will be created with measured data, this file can be viewed with tools like gprof or kprof.
User Interfaces
KProf
Outdated, but exists: http://kprof.sourceforge.net/
Documentation
Caveats
- Imprecise
- Huge overhead
Valgrind Cachegrind/Callgrind
Valgrind is tool suite for debugging and profiling. It's most famous for it's memcheck tool to check for memory leaks, invalid access, double frees and more, but also ships with interesting callgrind and cachegrind.
cachegrind will accurately simulate L1, L2 and D1 CPU caches so you can figure out what in your code is trashing your memory access.
callgrind is an extension of cachegrind that will collect call graphs.
User Interfaces
KCachegrind
The most famous user interface is KCachegrind
Documentation
- Valgrind information in this wiki
- Valgrind Manual
- FAQ
- http://docs.kde.org/kde3/en/kdesdk/kcachegrind/using-kcachegrind.html
Caveats
- Since these are simulators, your application will run very slow, from 20 to 100 times or more.