Share via


Profiling: Overview

How Do IDetails

Feature Only in Professional and Enterprise Editions   Profiling is supported only in Visual C++ Professional and Enterprise Editions. For more information, see .

The profiler is an analysis tool that you can use to examine the run-time behavior of your programs. By using profiler information, you can determine which sections of your code are working efficiently. The profiler can produce information showing areas of code that are not being executed or that are taking a long time to execute.

Because profiling is a tuning process, you should use the profiler to make your programs run better, not to find bugs. Once your program is fairly stable, you should start profiling to see where your code could perform better.

Use the profiler to determine whether,

  • an algorithm is effective (timing),

  • a function is being called too many or too few times with respect to the problem domain (counting), or

  • a piece of code is being covered by software testing procedures (coverage).

The profiler can be run from within the development environment or from the command line.