What is a good general purpose profiler that works on any program?

Question

I deal with a plethora of languages daily and I can't afford to learn the profiler tools specific to each language. I would like suggestions on a general purpose profiler, anything that would offer a more scientific approach than gawking at Window's sidebar widget and estimating the averages over time:

I'm interested in lowering the CPU and RAM usage of all of my programs.

Answer 1

I'm glad you said your object is to make the programs faster, as opposed to just getting measurements of how long they take.

This method is language-agnostic. It can be done with a utility like jstack, pstack, or lsstack, or you can simply do it with a debugger. The latter is my preference. If you are in Linux, and your code is compiled, you could try Zoom.

The method is a technique, not a tool. It is quite effective. In this example, a speedup of 43 times was achieved.

Answer 2

SmartBear Software AQtime Professional for windows development. If you are using Eclipse then use the built in profiler that uses TPTP. For PHP use XDebug which is a debugger and profiler.

Answer 3

Nothing beats performance monitor, and you can tailor your perf counters however you want. You can save the performance and all facets of it.