This chapter describes how the execution of OCaml programs can be profiled, by recording how many times functions are called, branches of conditionals are taken, …
Before profiling an execution, the program must be compiled in profiling mode, using the ocamlcp front-end to the ocamlc compiler (see chapter 11) or the ocamloptp front-end to the ocamlopt compiler (see chapter 14). When compiling modules separately, ocamlcp or ocamloptp must be used when compiling the modules (production of .cmo or .cmx files), and can also be used (though this is not strictly necessary) when linking them together.
If a module (.ml file) doesn’t have a corresponding interface (.mli file), then compiling it with ocamlcp will produce object files (.cmi and .cmo) that are not compatible with the ones produced by ocamlc, which may lead to problems (if the .cmi or .cmo is still around) when switching between profiling and non-profiling compilations. To avoid this problem, you should always have a .mli file for each .ml file. The same problem exists with ocamloptp.
To make sure your programs can be compiled in profiling mode, avoid using any identifier that begins with __ocaml_prof.
The amount of profiling information can be controlled through the -P option to ocamlcp or ocamloptp, followed by one or several letters indicating which parts of the program should be profiled:
For instance, compiling with ocamlcp -P film profiles function calls, if…then…else…, loops and pattern matching.
Calling ocamlcp or ocamloptp without the -P option defaults to -P fm, meaning that only function calls and pattern matching are profiled.
For compatibility with previous releases, ocamlcp also accepts the -p option, with the same arguments and behaviour as -P.
The ocamlcp and ocamloptp commands also accept all the options of the corresponding ocamlc or ocamlopt compiler, except the -pp (preprocessing) option.
Running an executable that has been compiled with ocamlcp or ocamloptp records the execution counts for the specified parts of the program and saves them in a file called ocamlprof.dump in the current directory.
If the environment variable OCAMLPROF_DUMP is set when the program exits, its value is used as the file name instead of ocamlprof.dump.
The dump file is written only if the program terminates normally (by calling exit or by falling through). It is not written if the program terminates with an uncaught exception.
If a compatible dump file already exists in the current directory, then the profiling information is accumulated in this dump file. This allows, for instance, the profiling of several executions of a program on different inputs. Note that dump files produced by byte-code executables (compiled with ocamlcp) are compatible with the dump files produced by native executables (compiled with ocamloptp).
The ocamlprof command produces a source listing of the program modules where execution counts have been inserted as comments. For instance,
ocamlprof foo.ml
prints the source code for the foo module, with comments indicating how many times the functions in this module have been called. Naturally, this information is accurate only if the source file has not been modified after it was compiled.
The following options are recognized by ocamlprof:
Profiling with ocamlprof only records execution counts, not the actual time spent within each function. There is currently no way to perform time profiling on bytecode programs generated by ocamlc. For time profiling of native code, users are recommended to use standard tools such as perf (on Linux), Instruments (on macOS) and DTrace. Profiling with gprof is no longer supported.