16

I'm trying to use gprof to profile a c++ application I've written but I can't figure out for the life of me how to download and install it. I've googled everything I can think of and can't even find a download link. Someone please help!

zaloo
  • 879
  • 3
  • 13
  • 27

3 Answers3

9

It seems there are two components to gprof. One is a part of the GCC compiler itself, invoked by using the -pg argument. The other is the gprof command, which apparently is part of GNU binutils. I'll leave it to you to figure out how to install GCC and binutils on OSX...

feuGene
  • 3,931
  • 2
  • 33
  • 46
7

I did not find a MacOS solution for gprof and gcov did not work for me, but gperftools (Google Performance Tools) do work. Here is how to install them on MacOS:

brew install google-perftools graphviz ghostscript gv
brew link --overwrite ghostscript

Next, run the profiler on a program:

CPUPROFILE=program_name.prof DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES=/usr/local/Cellar/gperftools/2.6.3/lib/libprofiler.dylib ./program_name
pprof --pdf program_name program_name.prof > program_name.pdf

You can find more options for gperftools here. Finally, open the program_name.pdf file in a PDF viewer such as Preview to enjoy the fancy graphviz output.

Obviously, running the profiler on a program can be automated very easily with a Bash script, as there only is the one program_name parameter and the shared library location is constant. Here is an example script called profile.sh that does exactly that, but includes compiling and adds a second variable so that you can compile .cpp files with a different name:

#!/bin/bash
g++-7 -fopenmp -O3 -o $1 $2.cpp
CPUPROFILE=$1.prof DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES=/usr/local/Cellar/gperftools/2.6.3/lib/libprofiler.dylib ./$1
pprof --pdf $1 $1.prof > $1.pdf
echo "Profiling results: $1.pdf"

Next, modify the permissions so it can run from any folder:

chmod +x profile.sh

The script can be invoked from the command line as follows, automating the full process:

./profile.sh program_name cpp_name

You may want to separate the compilation and profiling steps, which is easy enough to do by removing the g++-7 line in the shell script.

Adam Erickson
  • 6,027
  • 2
  • 46
  • 33
3

Since gprof does not work on OS X at the moment, use Google Performance Tools, now known as gperftools.

Also gcov works "out of the box" if you have gcc installed.

$ gcc -fprofile-arcs -ftest-coverage your_program.c
$ a.out
$ gcov your_program.c
johntellsall
  • 14,394
  • 4
  • 46
  • 40
cohadar
  • 4,709
  • 2
  • 20
  • 21
  • 1
    cohadar, did you check that google perf tools (pprof + libprofiler) works on OSX? gcov is not profiling tool, it is coverage tool... – osgx Jun 29 '16 at 17:56
  • If `your_program.c` exists in a different folder of running `gcov`, it will not work. You must pass `your_program.gcno` to the `gcov` to work. – Hamid Rouhani Oct 14 '16 at 13:31