History
Performance analysis tools existed on IBM/360 and IBM/370 platforms from the early 1970s, usually based on timer interrupts which recorded the Program status word (PSW) at set timer intervals to detect "hot spots" in executing code. This was an early example of sampling (see below). In early 1974, Instruction Set Simulators permitted full trace and other performance monitoring features.
Profiler-driven program analysis on Unix dates back to at least 1979, when Unix systems included a basic tool "prof" that listed each function and how much of program execution time it used. In 1982, gprof extended the concept to a complete call graph analysis.
In 1994, Amitabh Srivastava and Alan Eustace of Digital Equipment Corporation published a paper describing ATOM. ATOM is a platform for converting a program into its own profiler. That is, at compile time, it inserts code into the program to be analyzed. That inserted code outputs analysis data. This technique - modifying a program to analyze itself - is known as "instrumentation".
In 2004, both the gprof and ATOM papers appeared on the list of the 50 most influential PLDI papers of all time.
Read more about this topic: Profiling (computer Programming)
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