10.5. Install and Configure Performance Tools

The next step in the hunt is to install the performance tools if they are not already installed. Although this might seem like an easy thing to do, it often involves chasing down custom-made packages for a distribution or even recompiling the tools from scratch. In this case, we are going to use oprofile on Fedora Core 2, so we have to track down both the oprofile kernel module, which in Fedora's case, is only included in the symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) kernels and the oprofile package. It also may be interesting to use the ltrace performance tool to see which library functions are called and how often they are being called. Fortunately, ltrace is included in Fedora Core 2, so we do not have to track it down.