Introduction

A profiler is an application that records information about an application or system while it runs. That information can be explored to gain insight into how the application could be changed to perform better.

Two common categories of software profilers exist, commonly referred to as either tracing or sampling profilers. What is meant by tracing profiler is that every function call executed by the program is known to the profiler. A sampling profiler works by inspecting the state of the program on a regular frequency and therefore does not see every function call executed by the program.

Both tracing and sampling profilers have their advantages. A notable advantage of a sampling profiler is that the overhead is much less than that of a tracing profiler, making it easier to use for software that requires interactivity.

Sysprof is a sampling profiler.