[ Thanks to Flavio
Villanustre for this link. ]
“Sometimes System Administrators need to determine where
applications spend most of their time, in order to tune their
systems better. The traditional method, when the source code for
the application and gcc are available, is just to recompile the
application with the – pg flag and to use gprof to profile
it. Other than the inconvenience of the recompilation process, the
solution is pretty straightforward.“But what happens when you don’t have the source code for the
application? And what if you’d like to profile the system as a
whole…?”