Summary
In this chapter, we described what profiling is and when it's useful to apply it. We described that profiling is a dynamic tool that allows you to understand how code runs. This information is useful in understanding the flow in a practice situation and being able to optimize the code with that information. Code can be optimized normally to execute faster, but other alternatives are open, like using fewer resources (normally memory), reducing external accesses, etc.
We described the main types of profilers: deterministic profilers, statistical profilers, and memory profilers. The first two are mostly oriented toward improving the performance of code and memory profilers analyze the memory used by the code in execution. Deterministic profilers instrument the code to detail the flow of the code as it's executed. Statistical profilers sample the code at periodic times to provide a general view of the parts of the code that are executed more often.
We then showed...
