Profiling and benchmarking tools for Applications
Introduction
We develop a piece of software with aim to fulfil specific business requirements in terms of resource usage, throughput, availability among others. Profiling and benchmarking are approaches that developer has in his/her arsenal to gain continuous feedback on whether a piece of code is behaving optimally and adhering to it’s objectives.
Lets look at what they mean,
- Profiling is defined as process
aimed at understanding the behavior of a program. A profile result might be a table of time taken per function,as per this and this) - Benchmarking
measures the time for some whole operation. e.g. I/O operations per second under some workload. So the result is typically a single number, in either seconds or operations per second. Or a data set with results for different parameters, so you can graph it.. Refer this for more information. Also do check Benchmarking correctly is hard by Julia Evans.
Typically, Profiling is supported by most of the environments (either via IDEs like Visual Studio or through language itself [Like Go] has buil-in provision for the same while Benchmarking is typically performed on dedicated testing infrastructure.