Line by Line profiling of C++ code

Recently I encountered a performance issue in C++ code. I wrote around 200 lines of C++ code which was working perfectly fine with small input but damm slow with large input. I decided to profile the C++ code using gprofile. As a newbie to profiling market I searched a lot but was not able to find step by step instructions on how to profile C++ code line be line. And so I decided to document the steps I followed in this blog post.

There are many profilers available in market but after reading a lot about them I decide to go with gprof. To keep the post short and to the point I won’t describe logic behind each step.

Step 1. For check whether gprof is installed on your system.To do this, just run below command in terminal grpof

    If you get an error then follow below step to install it. Else, move to next step 

    For debian install using command 
        `apt-get install binutils`

    For Mac Os using command (assuming you have homebrew installed)
        `brew install binutils`

Step 2. Compile your C++ code with -pg -g flag. Something like: g++ -pg -g -o final final.cpp