6 Profiling

6.1 Introduction

MLWorks has a sophisticated profiler for investigating the CPU time used by a function call, the amount of space it allocates, how many times it is called during a given evaluation, and so on. This chapter discusses the GUI interface to the profiler, the profile tool.

In passing this chapter makes reference to the programmatic interface to the profiler, provided by the structures MLWorks.Profile and Shell.Profile, which are built in to the interactive environment. MLWorks.Profile presents a full interface that is substantially more flexible than that of the GUI profile tool, while Shell.Profile provides the means to invoke the GUI profile tool but with different profiler settings, such as stack scanning frequency and the type of profiling to be performed (which can be any or all of time profiling, space profiling, and call-counting). You can find out more about these structures in the MLWorks Reference Manual.

You can also access the profiler through the MLWorks runtime executable, mlrun. See the man page for mlrun for more details.

MLWorks User Guide (UNIX version 1.0) - 3 DEC 1996

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