Profiling (computer programming): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:31, 2 January 2014

Revision as of 15:31, 2 January 2014

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Performance analysis tools existed on [[IBM/360]] and [[IBM/370]] platforms from the early 1970s, usually based on timer interrupts which recorded the [[Program status word]] (PSW) at set timer intervals to detect "hot spots" in executing code. This was an early example of [[Sampling (statistics)|sampling]] (see below). In early 1974, [[Instruction Set Simulator]]s permitted full trace and other performance monitoring features.

Profiler-driven program analysis on Unix dates back to at least 1979, when Unix systems included a basic tool "prof" that listed each function and how much of program execution time it used. In 1982, gprof extended the concept to a complete [[call graph]] analysis.<ref name="gprof">S.L. Graham, P.B. Kessler, and M.K. McKusick, [http://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/psd/18.gprof/paper.pdf ''gprof: a Call Graph Execution Profiler''] //, Proceedings of the SIGPLAN '82 Symposium on Compiler Construction, SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 17, No 6, pp. 120-126; [[doi:10.1145/800230.806987]]</ref>

In 1994, Amitabh Srivastava and Alan Eustace of [[Digital Equipment Corporation]] published a paper describing ATOM.<ref>Amitabh Srivastava and Alan Eustace, "Atom: A system for building customized program analysis tools", 1994 ([http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ece548/tools/atom/man/wrl_94_2.pdf download]) // Proceeding