7.19 Statprof

(statprof) is a fairly simple statistical profiler for Guile.

A simple use of statprof would look like this:

(statprof-reset 0 50000 #t)
(statprof-start)
(do-something)
(statprof-stop)
(statprof-display)

This would reset statprof, clearing all accumulated statistics, then start profiling, run some code, stop profiling, and finally display a gprof flat-style table of statistics which will look something like this:

  %   cumulative      self              self    total
 time    seconds   seconds    calls  ms/call  ms/call  name
 35.29      0.23      0.23     2002     0.11     0.11  -
 23.53      0.15      0.15     2001     0.08     0.08  positive?
 23.53      0.15      0.15     2000     0.08     0.08  +
 11.76      0.23      0.08     2000     0.04     0.11  do-nothing
  5.88      0.64      0.04     2001     0.02     0.32  loop
  0.00      0.15      0.00        1     0.00   150.59  do-something
 ...

All of the numerical data with the exception of the calls column is statistically approximate. In the following column descriptions, and in all of statprof, "time" refers to execution time (both user and system), not wall clock time.

% time

The percent of the time spent inside the procedure itself (not counting children).

cumulative seconds

The total number of seconds spent in the procedure, including children.

self seconds

The total number of seconds spent in the procedure itself (not counting children).

calls

The total number of times the procedure was called.

self ms/call

The average time taken by the procedure itself on each call, in ms.

total ms/call

The average time taken by each call to the procedure, including time spent in child functions.

name

The name of the procedure.

The profiler uses eq? and the procedure object itself to identify the procedures, so it won’t confuse different procedures with the same name. They will show up as two different rows in the output.

Right now the profiler is quite simplistic. I cannot provide call-graphs or other higher level information. What you see in the table is pretty much all there is. Patches are welcome :-)

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