Prospect is an easy-to-use, instruction-pointer-sampling, flat profiler for obtaining code profiles in a non-intrusive way for Linux systems.  One can obtain profiles (both symbol-level and assembly-level) without undue requirements on the target application.  For example, there is no need to specially instrument the application and there is no need to rebuild or relink.  In fact, the only requirement is that the application be not stripped. Shared libraries escape even this requirement for the most part.

Both user and kernel profiles are output for every process that ran on the system in the defined time interval.  More in-depth kernel profiles are also available.  Prospect creates a process-centric view of the system.  It answers questions such as "Where and how are my applications spending their time?", and "Where is the kernel spending its time?"

Prospect gathers samples through using the oprofile sampling module released under GPL by John Levon while at the Victoria University of Manchester, UK.

The prospect SourceForge summary page is here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/prospect
And the prospect downloads page is here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=53151

License

Prospect is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), Version 2.

News

• 040115: Prospect 0.9.8b released.   Download here, and the release notes are here. This release updates oprofile support to oprofile version 0.7.1. Unfortunately this version of prospect is incompatible with prior releases of oprofile. So, please rebuild and install the included new 0.7.1 release of oprofile when you download.
• 040113: Prospect 0.9.8 and oprofile 0.6.1 uploaded to the Debian archive.   Thanks to the efforts of Al Stone, prospect version 0.9.8, the oprofile userspace tools, and the required 0.6.1 oprofile kernel module are now part of the Debian archive. Look for them in the unstable section at a mirror near you.
• Prospect 0.9.8a is released December 3, 2003.   Download here, and the release notes are here. This release brings the ability to write an ASCII trace output file for the experiment run with the --ascii-trace=File option. Two enhancement requests are honored as well. The release packages include full support for both Debian and Red Hat ia64 Linux systems as well as i386 systems.
• Prospect 0.9.8 is released November 19, 2003.   Download here, and the release notes are here. This release brings the ability to save a binary trace file of your run(a 'bfile' as it's commonly called) with the new -B option, and then play that file back with the new -b option. When a file is played back, no sampling occurs and the results are exactly the same as when you recorded that file. This allows changing post-processing options of prospect without having to re-run the experiment. The release packages include full support for both Debian and Red Hat ia64 Linux systems as well as i386 systems.
• Prospect 0.9.7b is released July 25, 2003.   Download here, and the release notes are here. Note: this release changes the command line options (to something saner hopefully, however the old options do not work anymore: 'prospect --help' should help). The release packages include full support for both Debian and Red Hat ia64 Linux systems as well as i386 systems.
• Prospect 0.9.7a is released July 2, 2003.   Download here, and the release notes are here. These packages include full support for both Debian and Red Hat ia64 Linux systems as well as i386 systems.
• Prospect 0.9.7 is released May 5, 2003.   Download here. These packages include full support for both Debian and Red Hat ia64 Linux systems.
• Prospect 0.9.6a is released November 11, 2002.   Download here.
• Prospect 0.9.6 is released November 7, 2002.   Download here.
• An internals paper was accepted and presented at the Ottawa Linux Symposium June, 2002.   You can find the paper here, and the corresponding talk slides here. If you prefer html format to read the paper, then that can be found here.
• Prospect 0.9.5 is released June 17, 2002.   Download here.

CVS Access Instructions

Anonymous CVS is setup in the standard way:

export CVSROOT=":pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/prospect"
cvs login
cvs -z3 co prospect

There is no password for login (just press enter).  Note that if you are behind a company firewall, you'll have to use a socks server to access this.  Ask a knowledgeable person in your domain how to do this.

Build Requirements

Currently, building Prospect requires that you have following packages installed on your system (the package names apply for a Debian system, other distributions should have similarly named packages):

libelfg0 - For reading symbol information out of ELF files.
libelfg0-dev - The development part of the package.
sudo - For making final prospect executable suid root (or just do it manually).

And once you've built Prospect successfully, you will of course need a functional oprofile installation. Currently, the Prospect CVS tree and distribution files contain the supported oprofile distribution which is 0.7.1.  Read the README.INSTALL file included in the Prospect distribution for more information since oprofile has it's own build requirements.

Links

Project Summary | Download Files | Bugs | Browse CVS | Tracker