Harwinder Sidhu

Notes on Profiling

Using gprof

• Add -pg flag to the compiler using CXXFLAGS or CFLAGS

• Add debug information using -g flag to the compiler

• The program must do an exit(), so that gprof can write its output to the gmon.out file. If the program does not already do this, add a signal handler to respond to SIGINT etc.

Tools required to generate (beautiful)call graph

yum install graphviz
pip install gprof2dot

gprof2dot is also available from this link.

Generate Call Graph

/path/to/your/executable arg1 arg2
gprof path/to/your/executable | gprof2dot.py | dot -Tpng -o output.png