For C++ profiling I used to use kcachegrind, but I stopped doing that after a while. In most cases, I need to look at the top four or five CPU thieves and nothing more, so it was very rarely necessary.

Still, it can be very useful when you have a more complex program, with very deep call-graphs. There, it can be very tricky to figure out where time is spent, and a graph is very helpful.

It has been years since I’ve had to deal with such programs, though :)

I most of my projects, I have some simple scripts combined with a few CPU heavy number-crunchers, and while they can be pretty tricky to write, profiling them is pretty easy.

Still, I can easily see XDot being useful for me. I’ve used Graphviz a lot in the past.

http://code.google.com/p/jrfonseca/wiki/Gprof2Dot

and the wonderful

http://code.google.com/p/jrfonseca/wiki/XDot

to visualize your profilings.

Best
Anders

PS That XDot is simply a wonderful piece of code to use for some gui. I adapted it for my treeviewer http://code.google.com/p/treepainter/