50 Software Performance Analyzers (Profilers)

What is Profiler?

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Most commonly, profiling information serves to aid program optimization. Profiling is achieved by instrumenting either the program source code or its binary executable form using a tool called a profiler (or code profiler).

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

Simply put, any tool or technique you use to analyze and optimize the performance can be called a profiler.

How does Profilers work?

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Commonly used profilers simply examine the running program regularly to see what assembly instruction is currently being executed (the program counter) and which routines called the current function (the call stack). This kind of sampling profiler can work with standard binaries, but are more useful if you have debugging symbols to work out lines of code given addresses in the program.

Other profilers involve recompiling the program to insert instructions (known as instrumentation) to count how often each continuous set of instructions (basic blocks) are executed, or maybe even record the sequence in which basic blocks are executed, or record the content of variables at certain places.

Reference: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/460698/how-do-code-profilers-work

Types of Profilers:

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It is common to classify profiling tools into two major categories:

1. Memory profilers
2. Performance profilers

All profilers, and performance profilers in particular, can be classified in yet another two categories:

1. Event-based profilers (also called tracing profilers)
2. Statistical profilers (also called sampling profilers)

Reference: https://iobservable.net/blog/2013/02/03/profiler-types-and-their-overhead/

50 profilers are as listed below:

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1. Allinea MAP
2. AMD CodeXL
3. AQTime
4. C++ Performance Validator
5. callgrind
6. CodeAnalyst Performance Analyzer
7. cRunWatch
8. CxxProf
9. DevPartner
10. dprofiler
11. DTrace
12. Dyninst
13. Embedded Profiler
14. Extrae
15. GlowCode
16. GoogleTest
17. GProf
18. Intel Architecture Code Analyzer
19. Intel Parallel Adivsor Lite
20. Intel Parallel Studio
21. Intel Performance Bottleneck Analyzer 4.0.1 Update Released
22. Intel Performance Counter Monitor
23. Intel Software Autotuning Tool
24. Intel Software Tuning Agent
25. Intel Vtune Amplifier
26. kernrate
27. likwid
28. Luke Stackwalker
29. MicroProfiler
30. oprofile
31. PAPI
32. perf
33. perfmon2
34. perftools
35. Proffy
36. PTU
37. Scalasca
38. Shiny
39. stacktrace command line arguement
40. Tau
41. Threadspotter
42. TrueTime
43. Valgrind
44. VampirTrace
45. Very Sleepy
46. Visual Studio Team System
47. VSPerfMon
48. VTune Performance Analyzer XE
49. Windows Performance Analyzer
50. Xperf

References:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_performance_analysis_tools 
• http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jain/cse567-06/ftp/sw_monitors1/ 
• http://icl.cs.utk.edu/papi/#64 
• http://performance-testing.org/content/performance-testing-tools