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6.2.1 Profiling an Ada Program with gprof ¶

This section is not meant to be an exhaustive documentation of gprof. You can find full documentation for it in the GNU Profiler User’s Guide documentation that is part of this GNAT distribution.

Profiling a program helps determine the parts of a program that are executed most often and are therefore the most time-consuming.

gprof is the standard GNU profiling tool; it has been enhanced to better handle Ada programs and multitasking. It’s currently supported on the following platforms

• Linux x86/x86_64
• Windows x86/x86_64 (without PIE support)

In order to profile a program using gprof, you need to perform the following steps:

1. Instrument the code, which requires a full recompilation of the project with the proper switches.
2. Execute the program under the analysis conditions, i.e. with the desired input.
3. Analyze the results using the gprof tool.

The following sections detail the different steps and indicate how to interpret the results.

• Compilation for profiling
• Program execution
• Running gprof
• Interpretation of profiling results