Re: profiler

["Jeff C," <nolongersafeto@userealemailsniff.com>]

"Peter Hermann" <ica2ph@sinus.csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de> wrote in message
news:bnaqu6$519$2@news.uni-stuttgart.de...
> please inform me about ways to profile an Ada program.
> A friend needs statistics on consumption of CPU-time and wall-clock-time
> of his Ada program system.
> Any info about methods and ready2use tools is welcome for me:
> ica2ph@csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de
>


Depends on the platform/compiler,etc.

With GNAT/GCC technology just compile with

-g -pg -fprofile-arcs

When the program is over, run gprof
The output looks a little scary at first but it is actually quite useful..
I'll think about writing a tutorial later today but the man pages are pretty
good in this area.

Known Problems:

Statistical Profilers typically operate by interrupting the program at fixed
intervals and seeing who
is running. Typically these interrupt at rates like 50-100Hz which means
that you might need to run your
program multiple times and or loop over it for a while to get accurate
results

On Linux, I believe the profiler is somewhat broken in that it does not
really work well with threaded programs (and
thus not well with Ada tasking programs).