Welcome to IgProf, the Ignominous Profiler. IgProf is a simple nice tool for
measuring and analysing application memory and performance characteristics.
IgProf requires no changes to the application or the build process. It
currently works on Linux (ia32, x86_64). Eons ago it worked also on Mac OS X
(PPC).
IgProf is fast, light weight and correctly handles dynamically loaded shared libraries, threads and sub-processes started by the application. We have used it routinely with large C++ applications consisting of many hundreds of shared libraries and thousands of symbols from millions of source lines of code. It requires no special privileges to run. The performance reports provide full navigable call stacks and can be customised by applying filters. Results from any number of profiling runs can be included. This means you can both dig into the details and see the big picture from combined workloads.
IgProf can be run in one of three modes: as a performance profiler, as a memory profiler, or in instrumentation mode. When used as a performance profiler it provides statistical sampling based performance profiles of the application. When used as a memory profiler information about both memory leaks and the total dynamic memory allocations are available. It can also be used to obtain a profile the live memory allocations in the heap at any given instant during the application run, although this requires a small code modification to signal from within your application the appropriate time to obtain the profile. For both profiling modes, one can produce either simple ASCII flat file or web-navigable reports. A complete performance and memory use picture can be obtained by running your application twice, once in each profiling mode. When run in instrumentation mode igprof can be used to precisely measure the time spent in a given function with the precision of a few ns.
The performance profiling adds negligibly to application run time and typically adds less than 50MB to the memory usage. The memory profiling overhead depends heavily on the application’s memory allocation patterns: the smaller allocations and the higher the rate, the more overhead. A fairly typical example from our own applications, running on 64-bit Scientific Linux 5, loading some 600 shared libraries, using 1 GB memory and allocating at roughly a million allocations per second rate (averaged over an hour or so), the run time overhead is ~250% and the memory use increased by ~1 GB. On 32-bit Linux the overhead is much less, about ~50% increase in run time, in some cases as little as 15%. Usually IgProf is considerably faster than valgrind or callgrind for the job.
Other profilers
Profiling is a craft art, and profilers are just tools. The best undestanding of your application is usually achieved by correlating a number of profiling result coming from different profilers and QA tools. If developing on a Mac OS X is an option, even if you otherwise develop on Linux, consider using Instruments. For very precise but much more expensive profiling you can use callgrind and valgrind. If you want to get more down-to-the-metal information OProfile, Linux perfctr, PAPI or perfmon2 are other statistical profilers that use CPU performance counters; they however require system privileges and kernel instrumentation.