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Everyone always says to profile your program before performing optimizations but no-one ever describes how to do so.
What are your practices for profiling C code?
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The C Profiler tool enables the collection and display of execution profile data on C software source code bases of arbitrary size. It is a member of SD's family of Profiler tools.
You can use profiling tools to identify which portions of the program are executed most frequently or where most of the time is spent. Profiling tools are typically used after a basic tool, such as the vmstat or iostat commands, shows that a CPU bottleneck is causing a performance problem.
Open the Performance Profiler by choosing Debug > Performance Profiler (or Alt + F2). For more information on using the CPU Usage or Memory usage tool in the Performance Profiler vs. the debugger-integrated tools, see Run profiling tools with or without the debugger.
Code profiling examines the application code to ensure it is optimized, resulting in high application performance. It analyzes the memory, CPU, and network utilized by each software component or routine.
Using gcc, I compile and link with -pg (as explained e.g. here), then continue by running the program (according to the principles also suggested at that URL) and using gprof. The tools will vary if you're using different compilers &c, but the URL is still recommended, even then, for the parts that are about general ideas on how and why to profile your code.
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