Analyzing Program Performance With Sun WorkShop

Basic Concepts

prof, gprof, and tcov extend the Sun WorkShop development environment to enable you to collect and use performance data. prof generates a program profile in a flat file. gprof generates a call graph profile. tcov generates statement-level information in a copy of the source file, annotated to show which lines are used and how often.

Table 4-1 lists these standard performance profiling tools.

Table 4-1 Performance Profiling Tools


Command	Action
`prof`	Generates a statistical profile of the CPU time used by a program, along with an exact count of the number of times each function is entered. This tool is included with the Solaris operating environment.
`gprof`	Generates a statistical profile of the CPU time used by a program, along with an exact count of the number of times each function is entered and the number of times each arc (caller-callee pair) in the program's call graph is traversed. This tool is included with the Solaris operating environment.
`tcov`	Generates exact counts of the number of times each statement in a program is executed. There are two versions of `tcov`: the original `tcov` and an enhanced `tcov`. They differ in the runtime support that generates the raw data used in the output. The original `tcov` obtains data from programs that are compiled with the `-xa` compiler option or the `-a` option (C++).