Prof2 – A Profiler

Frequently there is a problem with a program running slow and you do not know why. You need a thumbnail analysis of where the program is spending most of its time without all of the overwhelming details. This is when a Profiler comes in handy.

There are many different profilers available – this particular one does not do anything special and is fairly ordinary in that it just characterizes frequency of execution of various regions in the program. However, it has some pretty good strengths as listed next.

1. It takes very little or no preconditioning, i.e. setup
2. The effect it has on the running program is minimal
3. It runs almost at full speed, which is really nice
4. It is not particularly thread aware
5. Reports where it is executing at intervals of 100 times a second