Hi, I have a python application which I have been attempting to profile with gmon. After a few days effort, I managed to get some reasonably useful profiling information. (in short I had to compile the python interpreter with my extensions statically linked, threading disabled and, of course, -pg). I have two questions. First, the less serious problem. The gprof documentation claimed that if a program is compiled with -pg, it will be linked to a version of libc6 (I use glibc) which was also compiled with -pg so that profiling information will be available for standard library routines. However, my profiling data did not have any information for standard library routines, which seem to consume about half of the run time of my application. I looked around and don't seem to have a profiling version of the standard library installed. Is it still true that -pg should cause my program to link against a special version of libc6? I can't find any reference to this at the glibc site. Now the more serious problem. After finally getting reasonable profiling information, I decided to upgrade my gcc and glibc versions; gcc 3.3 from 3.1 and glibc 3.2.3 from 3.1. After doing this, my application has stopped producing gmon.out. It is nowhere to be found; I have checked my entire file system. A small test program compiled with -pg does produce gmon.out. I posted this problem to a python mailing listed and it was suggested that the problem may be due to the way gmon allocates its table for the function data. I will just insert the reply from python help here: ======================================================== Yes, this is a known problem. gmon needs to statically allocate an array of function descriptors, one per function. To do so, it uses a heuristics, based on the code size, and a ratio of functions per KByte code (or some such). Later, it might find that it has miscalculated its memory requirement, and that it needs more slots than it had estimated. In that case, it just gives up, and stops profiling; it then will also fail to produce any output. ======================================================= So, is this a likely cause of my problem? If so, is there a fix or a workaround? If not, do you have any other suggestions?? I have also found on another mailing list a suggestion that problems like this are a reason to use a more "modern" profiling utility. When I was getting good info from gmon, it was quite useful, so I would be happy to use it if I can get it working again. When I was looking around for profilers, I couldn't really find anything else anyway. Do you know of any other profiling utilities I might look into? Thanks much, Damon
