OProfile

It is often said that a program spends 90 percent of its time executing 10 percent of the code. Programmers use profiling tools to identify bottlenecks in code and target this 10 percent for optimization. OProfile is an advanced profiling tool that identifies common programming inefficiencies. Thanks to its close relationship with the kernel, OProfile is able to identify hardware-specific efficiency problems, such as cache misses, which are often not possible to identify from source code.