gprof

[Keith Bierman - Sun Tactical Engineering]

A question came up about what gprof refers to as cycles. Speaking off
the top of my head (or belly button) I came up with the following:


Cycles: gprof uses the language of graph theory (reasonable, since
gprof means graph profiler, or some such). 

	          a____    
                 / \   |
	        b   c  |
                |  /   |
                | d-----
                |  
             kkkkkk
             more stuff

"Walking" the graph we see the outside "edge" acd is a cycle. When
a,c, and d share library routines (I/O for example) the gprof would be
hard to read, and lead to poor conclusions (viz. make it easy to miss
a shared bottleneck), so gprof reorganizes things to present the data
in a more useful fashion.


Was I right ? I couldn't spot much in the man set...











Keith H. Bierman
It's Not My Fault ---- I Voted for Bill & Opus