An actual interrupt handler on Linux would indeed take a kernel module. Probably any other Unix, as well. There aren't that many unused interrupts around on x86, either.

How about something like this?

  1. fork a child which issues kill USR1, $parent now and then.
  2. In the parent define a $SIG{USR1} handler which increments a global hash of counts of curcop.

That is not perfect. Generally speaking, neither is the interrupt sampler you describe. With safe signals, the opcode following a long-running instruction like gethostbyname will be way oversampled. In either case sampling gets you running time statistics, but you give up coverage data.

My own notion of a neat profiler for perl would make use of the performance counter registers of modern processors. I've worked on that some. Maybe I should resurrect that project.

After Compline,
Zaxo

In reply to Re: Dreaming of a Better Profiler by Zaxo
in thread Dreaming of a Better Profiler by samtregar

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