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Next: 5.14.4 Clock resolution Up: 5.14 Profiling Previous: 5.14.2 Profiling Techniques

5.14.3 Nested or Recursive Calls

The profiler attempts to compensate for nested or recursive calls. Time and consing overhead will be charged to the dynamically innermost (most recent) call to a profiled function. So profiling a subfunction of a profiled function will cause the reported time for the outer function to decrease. However if an inner function has a large number of calls, some of the profiling overhead may ``leak'' into the reported time for the outer function. In general, be wary of profiling short functions that are called many times.



Raymond Toy
Mon Jul 14 09:11:27 EDT 1997