D.1. Introduction
One way to obtain useful information about the execution of a program is to use the GNU profiler utility gprof . This utility, which is part of most standard Linux installations, provides information on functions your program calls. By analyzing the data it provides, you can often improve the execution speed of a program by revising slow, inefficient sections of code. Additionally, profiling may illuminate bugs that may not have surfaced. The following sections present an overview of how to use gprof . Interested readers seeking additional information on this utility are encouraged to read the manual page for the utility and to visit the official GNU website (www.gnu.org) and peruse the full set of online documentation on gprof .
Profiling a program is a three-step process:
- The program is compiled and linked with profiling enabled.
- The executable version of the program is run to generate a special profile data file.
- The gprof utility is used to analyze and display the profiling data.
Programs and Processes
- Introduction
- Library Functions
- System Calls
- Linking Object Code
- Managing Failures
- Executable File Format
- System Memory
- Process Memory
- The u Area
- Process Memory Addresses
- Creating a Process
- Summary
- Key Terms and Concepts
Processing Environment
- Introduction
- Process ID
- Parent Process ID
- Process Group ID
- Permissions
- Real and Effective User and Group IDs
- File System Information
- File Information
- Process Resource Limits
- Signaling Processes
- Command-Line Values
- Environment Variables
- The /proc Filesystem
- Summary
- Key Terms and Concepts
Using Processes
- Introduction
- The fork System Call Revisited
- exec s Minions
- Using fork and exec Together
- Ending a Process
- Waiting on Processes
- Summary
- Key Terms and Concepts
Primitive Communications
- Introduction
- Lock Files
- Locking Files
- More About Signals
- Signal and Signal Management Calls
- Summary
- Key Terms and Concepts
Pipes
Message Queues
- Introduction
- IPC System Calls: A Synopsis
- Creating a Message Queue
- Message Queue Control
- Message Queue Operations
- A ClientServer Message Queue Example
- Message Queue Class
- Summary
- Key Terms and Concepts
Semaphores
- Introduction
- Creating and Accessing Semaphore Sets
- Semaphore Control
- Semaphore Operations
- Semaphore Class
- Summary
- Key Terms and Concepts
Shared Memory
- Introduction
- Creating a Shared Memory Segment
- Shared Memory Control
- Shared Memory Operations
- Using a File as Shared Memory
- Shared Memory Class
- Summary
- Key Terms and Concepts
Remote Procedure Calls
- Introduction
- Executing Remote Commands at a System Level
- Executing Remote Commands in a Program
- Transforming a Local Function Call into a Remote Procedure
- Debugging RPC Applications
- Using RPCGEN to Generate Templates and a MAKEFILE
- Encoding and Decoding Arbitrary Data Types
- Using Broadcasting to Search for an RPC Service
- Summary
- Key Terms and Concepts
Sockets
- Introduction
- Communication Basics
- IPC Using Socketpair
- Sockets: The Connection-Oriented Paradigm
- Sockets: The Connectionless Paradigm
- Multiplexing I/O with select
- Peeking at Data
- Out of Band Messages
- Summary
- Key Terms and Concepts
Threads
- Introduction
- Creating a Thread
- Exiting a Thread
- Basic Thread Management
- Thread Attributes
- Scheduling Threads
- Using Signals in Threads
- Thread Synchronization
- Thread-Specific Data
- Debugging Multithreaded Programs
- Summary
- Nomenclature and Key Concepts
Appendix A. Using Linux Manual Pages
Appendix B. UNIX Error Messages
Appendix C. RPC Syntax Diagrams
Appendix D. Profiling Programs
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 136
