Using a profiler is usually the most efficient way of finding hot spots in a program. Profilers analyze the execution of a program and output a statistical summary, a profile, of how often the functions or instructions in the program are being called. In addition, profilers usually also output a call graph that shows the relationship between function calls, that is, the callers and callees for each function that was called during the profiling. In the following figure, we can see that the sort() function was called from main() (the caller) and that sort() did call the function swap() (the callee):
Example of a call graph
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