How to profile multi-threaded C++ application on Linux?

c++ multithreading profiling gprof
anon picture anon · Mar 23, 2010 · Viewed 54.2k times · Source

I used to do all my Linux profiling with gprof.

However, with my multi-threaded application, it's output appears to be inconsistent.

Now, I dug this up:

http://sam.zoy.org/writings/programming/gprof.html

However, it's from a long time ago and in my gprof output, it appears my gprof is listing functions used by non-main threads.

So, my questions are:

  1. In 2010, can I easily use gprof to profile multi-threaded Linux C++ applications? (Ubuntu 9.10)
  2. What other tools should I look into for profiling?

Answer

Laurynas Biveinis picture Laurynas Biveinis · Mar 23, 2010

Edit: added another answer on poor man's profiler, which IMHO is better for multithreaded apps.

Have a look at oprofile. The profiling overhead of this tool is negligible and it supports multithreaded applications---as long as you don't want to profile mutex contention (which is a very important part of profiling multithreaded applications)

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