CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++clinuxx86profiling
pythonic
pythonic

Reputation: 21595

What is the fastest instrumentation profiler out there

What is the fastest profiler available for dynamic profiling (like what gprof does). The profiler has to be an instrumentation profiler, or even if it has sampling profiling with it, I'm interested to know the overhead of instrumentation profiling, because sampling profiling can be done with almost 0% overhead anyway.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 845

Answers (2)

Necrolis
Necrolis

Reputation: 26171

Any profiler that uses hardware based sampling (via the CPU PMSR's) will have the smallest overhead (as its reading the profiling data the CPU is keeping track of at a hardware level, for more info, see AMD & Intels Architecture manuals, they should be explained in-depth in one of the appendices).

The only profilers I know of using these are VTune for Intel (not free) and CodeAnalyst for AMD (free).

Next in line would be timer based profilers and event based profilers, of these the ones with the least overhead would probably be ones compiled directly into your code (CodeAnalyst has an API for event based, so does VTune). gprof also falls into this category (Clang also has something but IDK if its still maintained...). If you have VS Pro or Ultimate, its PG compile mode will do similar things, though I have never found it to compare with a dedicated profiler suite.

Last would be the ones that need to insert probes into your code to determine its profiling data, all the aforementioned ones can do this, as well as other freeware profilers like VerySleepy.

Upvotes: 1

Goz
Goz

Reputation: 62323

Intel's vtune amplifier is probably the most complete.

Upvotes: 0

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