gprof reports no time accumulated

Question

I'm trying to profile a C++ application with gprof on a machine running OSX 10.5.7. I compile with g++ in the usual way, but using -pg flags, run the application and try to view the call graph with gprof.

Unfortunately my call graph contains all zeroes for all time columns. The values in the "called" columns have reasonable values so it looks like something was profiled but I'm mystified about the lack of other data.

All my source files are compiled in a similar way:

g++ -pg -O2 -DNDEBUG -I./ -ansi -c -o  ScenarioLoader.o ScenarioLoader.cpp

I then run 'ar' to bundle all the object files into a library. Later, I link and run gprof as so:

g++ -pg -lm  -o vrpalone vrpalone.o ../src/atomicprof.a lastbuild.o
./vrpalone
gprof gmon.out | less

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If your program terminates in a non-clean manner then the profile data won't get written correctly - how is your program exiting?

Regardless, I'd strongly recommend using Shark instead of gprof - it's very easy to use and superior in pretty much every way to gprof - and doesn't require you to recompile your program.

Answer 2

How fast does your program run? If its extremely quick, it might be too fast to actually profile. I had this problem with a very simple text processing program: when I ran it with my sub-1kb test file it reported all 0s in the time columns. I solved this by running the entire text of The Great Gatsby through it. Try a larger dataset or looping through your main computation a few hundred times.

Answer 3

Does your program use multiple threads? I've experienced this issue with multithreaded programs on Linux, not sure if OS X would have the same problems

Here is a solution to the multithreading issue which I've used sucessfully in the past.

Answer 4

I thought I might share this Apple mailing list discussion which I recently ran across.

The behaviour described here is exactly what I am experiencing. It looks like gprof has been broken on OSX for quite some time.

I've resorted to Shark which has been helpfully suggested by Dave Rigby.

Thanks!

Answer 5

gprof has been around since 1982. Since that time, design of computers and languages has advanced enormously, but our collective understanding of performance issues has progressed very little. We still talk loosely about the same concepts that gprof introduced, and we have not sought to really understand them.

Here's a discussion and presentation of some newer ideas.