d1.06.01 Measuring performance (CPU) on Linux

Summary:

There are tools to track the CPU times used (profiling).

On Linux, we use the gprof tool. The use of this tool requires compiling all sources with the « -pg » option. The additional cost of instrumentation is negligible. The result of profiling is a text file that must be interpreted.

To simplify interpretation, a tool for drawing a graph from the text file produced by the « profiled » calculation is proposed at the end of the document.

Table of Contents

• 1. Gprof
  • 1.1. Building a version with gprof
  • 1.2. Over-cost of instrumentation
  • 1.3. Executing the instrumentated executable with waf
  • 1.4. Executing the instrumentated executable with astk
  • 1.5. Exploitation of results
  • 1.6. Analyze profiling results
  • 1.7. Analysis of the example
  • 1.8. Generating a graph with gprof2dot