What is profiling in unix?

Question

Hi, Can anybody tell me about 'profiling' in unix by giving a small example. Thank you!

Answer 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiling_%28computer_programming%29

Answer 2

You'll need to give us some more context if you want a useful answer. Broadly speaking, profiling a program is to instrument the executable with some extra statements that record details of execution which you can later analyse to identify parts that are slow, consume too much memory, consume too much CPU etc. Here's a quickie along with examples on how to use gprof which is the GNU profiler for C. http://www.cs.utah.edu/dept/old/texinfo/as/gprof.html#SEC2