Profiling Tools

Digital UNIX Version 4.0 supports the following profiling toolkit:

• ATOM

  Provides a flexible code instrumentation interface that is capable of building a wide variety of user-defined program analysis tools and comprises an instrumentation control tool and a library whose procedural interface enables programmers to easily develop special-purpose instrumentation/analysis tools.

  ATOM provides the following built-in instrumentation/analysis tools:

  • hiprof

    A call-graph profiling tool with output that can be post-processed by gprof.

  • third (Third degree)

    Finds memory leaks and checks for incorrect memory accesses.

  • pixie

    A superset of the existing pixie basic block profiler which can profile a program's executables and its shared libraries. The output of pixie can be analyzed by prof.

  Digital Unix V4.0 supports the following profiling tools:

• gprof

  For programs compiled with the -pg option, displays how many calls named procedures made to each other and how much CPU time each procedure consumed, using PC-sampling statistics. Also analyzes the output of programs instrumented with hiprof.

• prof

  For programs compiled with the -p option, displays how much CPU time was consumed by each procedure in a program and its shared libraries, using PC-sampling statistics. Also analyzes the output of programs instrumented with pixie or monitored with uprofile/kprofile.

• uprofile/kprofile

  Sample a variety of events in the CPU using the Alpha chip's built-in performance counters during the execution of an application program or the kernel itself. Can report on CPU cycles, memory/cache effects, and so forth, which prof can then analyze.

For more information on profiling tools, see the Programmer's Guide and the appropriate reference pages.