What is profiling?

Question

I am new to this and is trying to learn.

• What is profiling?
• What are various free tools for profiling .NET, Java EE?
• Can Javascript be profiled?
• If so, by which tool?
• And lastly, how do these profilers work?

Answer 1

Profiling measures how long various parts of the code take to run. Javascript can be profiled with firebug: http://getfirebug.com/js.html

Answer 2

profiling is measuring the execution times and correlating it with various classes/methods/functions. (see the link I gave to the wikipedia page for some commentary on how profilers can work)