10.4 Support for gprof, the gnu profiler

You can compile your programs with profiling support. For this, you just have to use the compiler switch -pg. The compiler will insert the necessary stuff for profiling.

When you have done this, you can run your program as you would normally run it:

yourexe

Where yourexe is the name of your executable.

When your program finishes, a file called gmon.out is generated. Then you can start the profiler to see the output. You can benefit from redirecting the output to a file, because it could be quite a lot:

gprof yourexe > profile.log

Hint: you can use the --flat option to reduce the amount of output of gprof. It will then only output the information about the timings.

For more information on the gnu profiler gprof, see its manual.