Traditional UNIX Performance Tools

The Solaris OS has long provided two standard UNIX® profiling tools prof and gprof. The prof utility generates a statistical profile of the CPU time used by a program and an exact count of the number of times each function is entered. The gprof utility 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. These tools, while useful for simple programs, are not adequate for tuning complex programs. See the prof(1) and gprof(1) man pages for more information about these standard tools.