相当于 gprof/callgrind 的分析库

Question

I'm looking for a C/C++ library with profiling capabilities such as gprof , or callgrind .

More precisely, I want its output to be equivalent to what callgrind would issue, in order to pass it to third-party tools such as KCacheGrind.

The idea is to be able to design an aspect based on this library and to plug it into several applications we are developing in my team.

Answer 1

The CPU profiler from gperftools can be attached to arbitrary executables using either LD_PRELOAD or typical dynamic linkage. It can output data in a callgrind-compatible format.

Let's assume that you'd like to profile an executable a.out . Begin by linking it with -lprofiler . Afterwards run it with CPUPROFILE env. variable pointing to a name of a file where profiling data will be stored. Data in the callgrind format can be obtained using pprof .

CPUPROFILE=a.out.prof ./a.out
pprof --callgrind a.out a.out.prof

What's interesting is the fact that with CPUPROFILE undefined your executable behaves normally. As a result this profiler can be easily enabled without recompiling or relinking the application.

If for any reason you cannot alter the way the executable is linked you can still profile it by defining LD_PRELOAD in a following fashion.

LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/libprofiler.so CPUPROFILE=a.out.prof ./a.out