You know about the --control=fifo option of perf, right? You can turn perf on, and off, using that fifo. You can use this to programmatically enable the profil

You know about the --control=fifo option of perf, right? You can turn perf on, and off, using that fifo. You can use this to programmatically enable the profiler for individual sections of code, and then disable it for the other sections. ----------- Are you coarse-profiling your code first? Have you run gprof first and figured out which section of code you're focusing on? EDIT: Using perf alone (though IMO a bad idea), you can also get instruction counts. You should be focusing on the instructions that are run the most. But because instructions take a variable amount of time, what you really want to be doing is profiling using a timer-based method (ex: gprof) and narrowing your search through that instead. But sometimes, the instruction-based approach is also useful.