profiling Octave

[Rik]

jwe,

I wanted to look to look empirically at the slow down that has occurred
over time with Octave.

I tried oprofile first, but even with some tweaking of the sampling
frequency I couldn't get high enough resolution to really see what needs to
be optimized.

Since we're using GNU tools I thought I would just instrument the code by
compiling with -pg and then use gprof to examine things.  But, run-octave
quits immediately with "Profiling time alarm".  I suspect it is something
to do with uncaught signals and the way that the octave wrapper forks
immediately.

As a final stab I tried Callgrind with 'run-octave -callgrind' but the
resulting log file is completely empty.  Probably, again, because it is
tracking the wrapper that forks rather than the true executable.

Any ideas?

--Rik