View Source: Profiling - Waikato Linux Users Group

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[Profiling] means monitoring code at RunTime to collect information about what it spends its time doing. The goal is to identify computationally intensive parts worthy of [Optimisation] -- either manually by a programmer tweaking the SourceCode, or automatically during CompileTime.

Automatic [Optimisation] generally yields much lower gains, but manual [Optimisation] is expensive. The two methods are therefor generally complementary; you will usually want to make initial [Optimisation]s manually, yielding greater speedups before diminishing returns render further effort inefficient, and then squeeze out a little more performance yet by automatic means.

If a traditional [Compiler] is used, [Profiling] information is generally saved to disk, either as a summary (requires more [RAM]) or as a log (requires more diskspace), and then postprocessed for use by the [Compiler]. [GCC] uses the <tt>-pg</tt> argument to build BinaryExecutable~s instrumented with profiling code and gprof(1) to display the resulting data. The [JVM] has profiling infrastructure already built into it, so normally compiled [Java] classes can always be profiled. There is a standard interface to the profiling and debugging features and several user-level interfaces, including fancy [GUI] applications.

If a JustInTime [Compiler] is used, this work can also be done AutoMagic~ally at RunTime, in which case it is called a HotSpotCompiler. Many recent [JVM]s sport such a HotSpotCompiler.

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Last edited on Wednesday, September 15, 2004 1:53:33 pm by AristotlePagaltzis

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