Profiling with google perftools

As an alternative to profiling with gprof, you can use google-perftools as follows:

1. Install google-perftools. Either grab it from http://code.google.com/p/gperftools/ or in Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install google-perftools libgoogle-perftools-dev

2. Run the tool you want to profile with a couple of extra environment variables:

   • LD_PRELOAD should contain /usr/lib/libprofiler.so for CPU profiling and /usr/lib/libtcmalloc.so for heap profiling.
   • CPUPROFILE should contain the name of the file to write CPU profiling data to if you want to do CPU profiling.
   • HEAPPROFILE should contain the name of the file to write heap profiling data to if you want to do heap profiling.

   So for example:

   $ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libprofiler.so CPUPROFILE=cpu_profile ./cbmc my_test_program.c

   or

   $ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libtcmalloc.so HEAPPROFILE=heap_profile ./cbmc my_test_program.c

3. Visualize your profile using pprof, as described at http://google-perftools.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/cpuprofile.html:

$ google-pprof --gv cpu_profile cbmc