Introduction

Profiling - Famous Words

Donald E. Knuth

Premature optimization is the root of all evil

Tony Hoare

Premature optimization is the root of all evil

Larry Wall

Optimizations always bust things, because all optimizations are, in the long haul, a form of cheating, and cheaters eventually get caught.

The Practice of Programming, Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike

Measurement is a crucial component of performance improvement since reasoning and intuition are fallible guides and must be supplemented with tools like timing commands and profilers.

Profiling - Introduction

General Rules …

• Focus on clean design ⟶ efficiency follows

• Optimization near the end of the project

• Proven hotspots need optimization

• Proof through profiling

How? On Linux …

• gprof: compile time code instrumentation, single program

• valgrind --tool=callgrind: emulation

• oprofile: no instrumentation, global system view