What is a Profiler? Foundation

In its broadest sense, a profiler is a tool that helps you to understand and improve your application. The profiler traces the execution of your code and records the program flow of an application program. This data can later be analyzed to understand which parts of the program are executed and how much time they have used. The Profiler will help you to tune and understand your application in cases where the debugger cannot help you, especially in multi-threaded applications.

Internally, the compiler inserts call hooks for every function call and return. These hooks, in turn, are calling functions of the profiler responsible for generating the output. Note that the size of the generated output file will increase proportional to the number of called functions/methods and the total time the program runs. You should expect a rather large output file if you run your program over a certain time.