This week, Ruud van der Pas of OpenMP fame gave a talk in our NHR PerfLab seminar on gprofng, the next-generation GNU profiling tool. If you ever felt that gprof was sorely lacking features like threading support, sampling, and drilling down to source, gprofng comes to rescue. Now you can profile code without even recompiling it, which comes in handy (not only) if you don’t have the source. It has recently been accepted as part of the Linux binutils package and will inevitably find its way into standard Linux distros. If you don’t want to wait that long, clone the development repo with

git clone git://sourceware.org/git/binutils-gdb.git

and compile it yourself. Here’s the recording of Ruud’s talk, where he explains the basic functions of gprofng and also takes a peek at upcoming features like HTML output and hardware performance counter support: