Profiling C code on Windows when using Eclipse

Question

I know I can profile my code with gprof and kprof on Linux. Is there a comparable alternative to these applications on Windows?

Answer 1

Commercial software:

• Rational Quantify (expensive, slow, but very detailed)
• AQTime (less expensive, less slow, a bit detailed)

Free software:

• Very sleepy (www.codersnotes.com)
• Luke StackWalker (lukestackwalker.sourceforge.net)

These commercial alternatives change the compiled code by 'instrumenting' (adding instructions) to it and perform the timing withing the added instructions. This means that they cause your application to slow down seriously.

These free alternatives use sampling, meaning they are less detailed, but very fast. In practice I found that especially Very Sleepy is very good to have a quick look at performance problems in your application.