Profiling with GNU gprof¶
Gprof is the profiler which belongs to the gcc compiler. Gprof is also installed on the system and can be used to profile your code. The profiler supports C, C++, Pascal and Fortran 77 program code. With this tool it is possible to analyse call times and time spent within program functions.
The first required step is to compile your program with the profiling flag -pg.
$ gcc -pg ex.c -o ex
Compiled in this way your program will generate profiling data during execution. By default a file named gmon.out can be found in the work directory after running the program.
$ ./ex
The next step is to run the gprof program to analyse the gmon.out profiling data file. This file contains profiling data concerning the program execution, like an overview, time information or the call graph, in human readable format.
$ gprof gmon.out ex > outputfile.txt