Re: Re: Dreaming of a Better Profiler

[samtregar]

How about something like this?

That's a reasonable idea, and it might just work. It might also have too much overhead to run fast enough to get a good sampling rate. At the very least it could be a good way to get the curcop-logging and subroutine-name resolution code working without tackling the interupt handler.

My own notion of a neat profiler for perl would make use of the performance counter registers of modern processors. I've worked on that some. Maybe I should resurrect that project.

That sounds very interesting. Can you suggest any reading material on the subject?

Thanks,
-sam

[Zaxo]

The Intel processor manuals are probably the best reference for the low-level stuff. They are available online in pdf format.

Perfctr is a Linux kernel patch and user library which permits users to access the performance counters on a per-process basis. One drawback to that approach is that is very platform specific. It would be difficult to write a perl module distribution of acceptable generality.