How do I profile code beyond per-function level?

Question

AFAIK profilers can only tell how much time is spent in each function. But since C++ compilers tend to inline code aggressively and also some functions are not that short it's often useful to know more details - how much time each construct consumes.

How can this be achieved except restructuring code into smaller functions?

Answer 1

If you use a sampling profiler (e.g. Zoom or Shark), rather than an instrumented profiler (e.g. gprof) then you can get much finer grained profiles, down to the statement and instruction level.

Answer 2

If you can use callgrind then you can get a summary of which methods are taking most of the processing time. Then you can use kcachegrind to view the results. It gives a very nice graph, through which you can easily browse and find bottlenecks.