Is there a better profiler than gprof?
Russell Turpin
turpin at cs.utexas.edu
Sat Aug 26 08:06:28 AEST 1989
My company is engaged in a modeling project, and we just
discovered that Unix's gprof is deceptive. From its display, it
appears to measure time spent in a procedure separately for each
call path to the procedure. In fact, it only measures total time
spent in the procedure, and then allocates this total to the
different call paths proportionately to the number of times each
call path is executed.
(We discovered this after being astounded that the time spent in
procedures was independent of where they were called -- a surprising
phenomenon for the system we are modeling. It turns out that the
gprof documentation has a small note on this, but we were fooled by
the clearly labeled report it generates.)
Does anyone know of a Unix profiler which actually measures what
gprof just appears to measure? More generally, does anyone know
of a better profiler? We are using Sun 3's and 4's, and a
profiler that works just on these machines would be useful even
if it didn't work on other Unix systems. We would also be
interested in a tool which automatically instuments either
Fortran or C code. We would be glad to hear about commercial
products as well as software in the public domain.
Please e-mail me, as I do not read this group as a matter of
habit. Thanks for any information. If it is desired, I will
post a summary of what I learn.
Russell
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