Profiling visualization tools?

Question

I need to display profiling information pulled from a deeply embedded CPU, presenting it in a way which other developers on my team will be able to act upon. The profiling data is a snapshot of a cycle counter at the entry and exit of every function, so we have a call graph annotated with sub-microsecond timing accuracy. I'd prefer not to just dump out function names and timing like gprof, I'm looking for something easier to understand and act upon.

Has anyone worked with a particularly good profiling tool (on any platform), which made it easy to identify areas of the code to drill into? I'm looking for an inspirational example to follow for how to display the call graph, but if there is good tool with an input format I can massage my data to I'll use it. I could use Windows, Linux, or MacOS X to run the visualization tool.

A profiling article on IBM DeveloperWorks led me to GraphViz, with a profiling example on their site. Barring another suggestion here, I'll use GraphViz and mimic their profiling example.

Answer 1

Another neat tool to visualize profiling data is the gprof2dot.py python script. It can be used to visualize several different formats: "This is a Python script to convert the output from prof, gprof, oprofile, Shark, AQtime, and python profilers into a dot graph." This is what the output look like:

_{(source: googlecode.com)}