Profiling basics

Profiling is a dynamic analysis that instruments code to understand how it runs. This information is extracted and compiled in a way that can be used to get a better knowledge of a particular behavior based on a real case, as the code is running as usual. This information can be used to improve the code.

Certain static analysis tools, as opposed to dynamic, can provide insight into aspects of the code. For example, they can be used to detect if certain code is dead code, meaning it's not called anywhere in the whole code. Or, they can detect some bugs, like the usage of variables that haven't been defined before, like when having a typo. But they don't work with the specifics of code that's actually being run. Profiling will bring specific data based on the use case instrumented and will return much more information on the flow of the code.

The normal application of profiling is to improve the performance of the code under analysis...