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Profiling,
a form of dynamic program analysis to determine frequency and duration of function calls inside a (chess) program, or to analyze its space (memory) or time complexity and (parallel) performance. Profiling is achieved by instrumenting either the program source code or its binary executable using a tool called a profiler, often integrated into runtime APIs of interpreted languages, or for compiled languages into compiler collections or processor tool sets. Most commonly, profiling information is used to find hot spots and performance bottlenecks, and to serve as aid for program optimization. So called flat profilers compute the average call times, from the calls, but do not break down the call times based on the callee or the context ^[1], while call graph profilers show the call times, and frequencies of the functions, and also the call-chains involved based on the callee ^[2].

PGO

Profile-guided optimization (PGO) is a compiler optimization which uses the results of profiling test runs of an instrumented program to optimize the final generated code.

See also

• Debugging
• Engine Testing
• Logging
• Perft
• Search Statistics

Postings

1999

• Profiling by James Robertson, CCC, April 17, 1999

2000 ...

• Profiling with Visual C++ 5 and 6: a story of woe by Tom Kerrigan, CCC, January 31, 2000
• profiling problem by Martin Fierz, CCC, February 07, 2002
• Profiling under gcc by Sven Reichard, CCC, May 22, 2002
• Profiling by Federico Corigliano, CCC, January 16, 2003
• Another memory latency test by Dieter Bürssner, CCC, July 17, 2003 » Memory
• performance profiling tools by Eric Oldre, CCC, June 24, 2004

2005 ...

• Profiling in Visual C++ Express by Richard Allbert, CCC, August 17, 2008
• Profiling times by Fermin Serrano, CCC, February 06, 2009
• Visual Studio Profiling Available With VS2010 Beta by Brian Richardson, CCC, May 21, 2009
• I need help, performance wall! by Adam Berent, CCC, October 21, 2009

2010 ...

• How to visualize profiler output as graph using Gprof2Dot – Code Yarns, June 24, 2013
• Stockfish PGO and popcn by Louis Zulli, CCC, July 15, 2013 » Stockfish
• Getting MingW profiling working by Tom Likens, CCC, October 27, 2013

2015 ...

• Profiling Comparisons by Dennis Sceviour, CCC, September 06, 2015
• How to speed up my engine by Laurie Tunnicliffe, CCC, May 02, 2016
• Beginner's guide to graphical profiling by Matthew Lai, CCC, September 10, 2016 » Giraffe
  Re: Beginner's guide to graphical profiling by Marco Costalba, CCC, September 10, 2016 » Stockfish
• Tipical cache and branch misses for a chess engine by Nicu Ionita, CCC, September 14, 2016 » Avoiding Branches, Memory

External Links

• Profiling (computer programming) from Wikipedia
• Computer performance from Wikipedia
• Profile-guided optimization from Wikipedia
• List of performance analysis tools from Wikipedia
  • CodeXL from Wikipedia
  • Gprof from Wikipedia
    GitHub - jrfonseca/gprof2dot: Converts profiling output to a dot graph by José Fonseca
    GPROF Tutorial – How to use Linux GNU GCC Profiling Tool
    Profiling GNU/Linux applications - RidgeRun Developer Connection
  • Intel Parallel Studio from Wikipedia
  • Valgrind from Wikipedia
  • VTune from Wikipedia
• Benchmark (computing) from Wikipedia

References

1. ^ Profiling (computer programming) from Wikipedia
2. ^ Beginner's guide to graphical profiling by Matthew Lai, CCC, September 10, 2016

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