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ABSTRACT

We extended the UNIX® system's profiler by gathering arcs in the call graph of a program. Here is it 20 years later and this profiler is still in daily use. Why is that? It's not because there aren't well-known areas for improvement.Large complex programs are composed of many small routines that implement abstractions for the routines that call them. To be useful, an execution profiler must attribute execution time in a way that is significant for the logical structure of a program as well as for its textual decomposition. This data must then be displayed to the user in a convenient and informative way. The gprof profiler accounts for the running time of called routines in the running time of the routines that call them. The design and use of this profiler is described.

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