O.K Apart from doing stupid references to films I actually have not really liked. What am I doing?
After reading a few mails from the Linux Kernel Mailing list, I found the following tool which seems useful: oprofile. I must admit I still do not have a clear idea of all the possibilities that this tool offers.
The first thing to know it is a profiler and it is a profiler capable of giving a number of information on a program with quite a low overhead. But what is a profiler?
A profiler collects information on running processes of a computer to analyze the performance of a program (see the wikipedia article on performance analysis).
It gives the possibility to look at the following aspects of a system:
- Call-graphs (i.e it looks at the graph of the functions calls of programs)
- libraries used by a program
- instruction level information collections (also on assembly code level)
