measure performance of a common-lisp program

Question

I wrote a common-lisp program and it is slower than it needs to be. Now I want to analyse my code to see where my time is going. Are there any tools that people use?

Answer 1

If you are using SLIME, there are a few profiling commands you could use besides time and implementation specific tools.

Use M-x slime-toggle-profile-fdefinition to (un)profile specific functions, M-x slime-profile-report to show the results, and M-x slime-profile-reset for resetting.

Answer 2

If you're using SBCL, there is a neat statistical profiler available - http://www.sbcl.org/manual/Statistical-Profiler.html.

For simple measurements, you can use time, which is available on all Common Lisp implementations.