gprof(1) is the most widely available profiler for unix platforms. When you are compiling
software using GCC, you can use the -pg
option to enable profiling in the code
generated by the compiler. Please refer to the gcc manual for more
information about profiling switches.
When you execute an application compiled with profiling turned on, a file named gprof.out
is generated after execution. If a file with the same name already exists, it is overwritten.
Please refer to the gprof documentation for more information about this (type
info gprof).
Once you have the gprof.out
generated, you can start using KProf. If the file is
in the same directory than the application, then you can directly open the application itself
using KProf. The gprof.out
file will be automatically detected and analyzed.
In the case the gprof.out
file is in another directory, you must either move it
to the application directory or manually execute the gprof(1) command to generated the text
output that KProf needs, using this command:
%
gprof
-b
application-name
gmon.out >results-file.txt
Now you can open the text results file with KProf, making sure that you select GNU gprof as the file type at bottom of the Open File dialog.
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