A profiler is a tool that monitors the execution of another application. A common language runtime (CLR) profiler is a dynamic link library (DLL) that consists of functions that receive messages from, and send messages to, the CLR by using the profiling API. The profiler DLL is loaded by the CLR at run time.
Select functions you wish to profile in the Functions tab by right clicking and choosing Hook . In the Capture tab, start profiling by pressing F5 . To stop profiling, press F5 again. You can either zoom time using W and S or ctrl + the scroll wheel.
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.
CodeXL has now superseded the End Of Line'd AMD Code Analyst and both are free, but not as advanced as VTune.
There's also Sleepy, which is very simple, but does the job in many cases.
Note: All three of the tools above are unmaintained since several years.
Very Sleepy is a C/C++ CPU profiler for Windows systems (free).
Proffy is quite cool: http://pauldoo.com/proffy/
Disclaimer: I wrote this.
There is an instrumenting (function-accurate) profiler for MS VC 7.1 and higher called MicroProfiler. You can get it here (x64) or here (x86). It doesn't require any modifications or additions to your code and is able of displaying function statistics with callers and callees in real-time without the need of closing application/stopping the profiling process.
It integrates with VisualStudio, so you can easily enable/disable profiling for a project. It is also possible to install it on the clean machine, it only needs the symbol information be located along with the executable being profiled.
This tool is useful when statistical approximation from sampling profilers like Very Sleepy isn't sufficient.
Rough comparison shows, that it beats AQTime (when it is invoked in instrumenting, function-level run). The following program (full optimization, inlining disabled) runs three times faster with micro-profiler displaying results in real-time, than with AQTime simply collecting stats:
void f()
{
srand(time(0));
vector<double> v(300000);
generate_n(v.begin(), v.size(), &random);
sort(v.begin(), v.end());
sort(v.rbegin(), v.rend());
sort(v.begin(), v.end());
sort(v.rbegin(), v.rend());
}
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