Profiling

Profiling is the process of measuring where computing resources (typically: CPU time, memory) are spent in a program at runtime.

With profiling information we can validate that our program stays within its resource budget, or quantitatively compare the runtime characteristics of different implementations.

Effective use of profiling often involves a mix of profiling during development as well as in production (likely: at different granularity). To prevent regressions it needs to be continuous.

Spicy supports both instrumentation to emit high-level profiling information as well as low-level profiling with typical tools. In the following we discuss these approaches separately.