Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Profiling GNURadio with gprof

[Eric Blossom]

On Mon, May 15, 2006 at 10:06:14AM -0700, Thomas Schmid wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am trying to profile my code with gprof. I configured and compiled
> my modules with the --with-gprof option. Next, I run my test script
> which uses these modules and the script returns without any errors (I
> use a filesource to deliver the data to my modules). Now I should have
> the gmon.out file which I can analyze with gprof, but it isn't there.
> Any ideas what I am doing wrong? Or can someone give me some hints on
> how they profile their GNURadio applications?
> 
> Thank you,
> Thomas

Don't use gprof, use oprofile <http://oprofile.sf.net>.
oprofile takes advantage of h/w performance counters and doesn't
require any changes to your application code.  You can profile fully
optimized code without any (significant) measurement overhead.

The problem with gprof is most likely that since we're running within
python, the initialization code doesn't get called that sets up the
profiling.  In any case, oprofile is a vastly superior solution.
Besides CPU ticks, it's also possible to profile cache misses, etc.
The actual things that you can profile are processor dependent.

Eric