CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2013/ch1 1w02 pp

Introduction to Profiling

Profiling in general, is an important feature in computer science. It is technique, in the most basic terms, by which one can analyze the efficiency of the program or code by measuring the programs time complexity or space complexity, and some other related performance parameters. For Example, the time complexity includes total running time, CPU time, memory used, time taken by each module or function, function calls, response time and many similar important aspects of our program/application. Profiling takes up the significant steps or constructs (like loop statements, statements involving operations and functions like aggregate functions, individual blocks and modules) in the program source code for performance study.

Ruby profiling is analysis of Ruby programs. We make use of profiles that are programs, which takes ruby code as input and on execution give values for a set of parameters that define the performance of the input ruby program. There are many types of profiling method like event-based and statistical methods. Ruby mostly uses event-based profilers. Here in case of Ruby profiler, we get the analysis results in various formats like table, graphs etc.

Significance of Profiling

The main purpose of profiling is:

• To analyze the performance of the code, their CPU utilization, memory operations and also to find out bottlenecks in our program.

• Based on the results presented by the profiler, one can improve upon the code with better constructs and functions and hence we can easily optimize the code in accord with the system requirements.

• We can accurately measure how a program functions or performs in one given environment and with different input data.

• To identify the bottlenecks in a program, the portions that actually cause program overhead or can slow down the system o need special testing or can raise exception.