View Source fprof - The File Trace Profiler
fprof is a profiling tool that can be used to get a picture of how much
processing time different functions consumes and in which processes.
fprof uses tracing with timestamps to collect profiling data. Therefore there
is no need for special compilation of any module to be profiled.
fprof presents wall clock times from the host machine OS, with the assumption
that OS scheduling will randomly load the profiled functions in a fair way. Both
own time, that is, the time used by a function for its own execution, and
accumulated time, that is, execution time including called functions.
Profiling is essentially done in 3 steps:
Tracing to a file.
Profiling: the trace file is read and raw profile data is collected into an internal RAM storage on the node. During this step the trace data may be dumped in text format to file or console.
Analysing: the raw profile data is sorted and dumped in text format either to file or console.
Since fprof stores trace data to a file, the runtime performance degradation is
minimized, but still far from negligible, especially for programs that themselves
use the filesystem heavily. Where the trace file is placed is also important;
on Unix systems /tmp is usually a good choice, while any
network-mounted disk is a bad choice.
fprof can also skip the file step and trace to a tracer process of its own that
does the profiling in runtime.
The following sections show some examples of how to profile with fprof.
Profiling from the source code
If you can edit and recompile the source code, it is convenient to
insert fprof:trace(start) and
fprof:trace(stop) before and after the code to be profiled.
All spawned processes are also traced. If you want some other filename than
the default, use fprof:trace(start, "my_fprof.trace").
When execution is finished, the raw profile can be processed using
fprof:profile(),
or fprof:profile(file, "my_fprof.trace")
for a non-default filename.
Finally create an informative table dumped on the console with
fprof:analyse(), or on file with
fprof:analyse(dest, []), or
fprof:analyse([{dest, "my_fprof.analysis"}, {cols, 120}])
for a wider listing of a non-default filename.
Profiling a function
If you have one function that does the task that you want to profile, and the
function returns when the profiling should stop, it is convenient to use
fprof:apply(Module, Function, Args) for the tracing step.
If the tracing should continue after the function has returned, for
example if it is a start function that spawns processes to be
profiled, use
fprof:apply(M, F, Args, [continue | OtherOpts]).
The tracing has to be stopped at a suitable later time using
fprof:trace(stop).
Immediate profiling
It is also possible to trace immediately into the profiling process that creates the raw profile data, that is to short circuit the tracing and profiling steps so that the filesystem is not used for tracing.
Do something like this:
{ok, Tracer} = fprof:profile(start),
fprof:trace([start, {tracer, Tracer}]),
%% Run code to profile
fprof:trace(stop);This puts less load on the filesystem, but much more load on the Erlang runtime system.