What's the best free C++ profiler for Windows? [closed]

I'm looking for a profiler in order to find the bottleneck in my C++ code. I'd like to find a free, non-intrusive, and good profiling tool. I'm a game developer, and I use PIX for Xbox 360 and found it very good, but it's not free. I know the Intel VTune, but it's not free either.

Solution 1:

CodeXL has now superseded the End Of Line'd AMD Code Analyst and both are free, but not as advanced as VTune.

There's also Sleepy, which is very simple, but does the job in many cases.

Note: All three of the tools above are unmaintained since several years.

Solution 2:

Very Sleepy is a C/C++ CPU profiler for Windows systems (free).

Solution 3:

Proffy is quite cool: http://pauldoo.com/proffy/

Disclaimer: I wrote this.

Solution 4:

There is an instrumenting (function-accurate) profiler for MS VC 7.1 and higher called MicroProfiler. You can get it here (x64) or here (x86). It doesn't require any modifications or additions to your code and is able of displaying function statistics with callers and callees in real-time without the need of closing application/stopping the profiling process.

It integrates with VisualStudio, so you can easily enable/disable profiling for a project. It is also possible to install it on the clean machine, it only needs the symbol information be located along with the executable being profiled.

This tool is useful when statistical approximation from sampling profilers like Very Sleepy isn't sufficient.

Rough comparison shows, that it beats AQTime (when it is invoked in instrumenting, function-level run). The following program (full optimization, inlining disabled) runs three times faster with micro-profiler displaying results in real-time, than with AQTime simply collecting stats:

void f()
{
    srand(time(0));

    vector<double> v(300000);

    generate_n(v.begin(), v.size(), &random);
    sort(v.begin(), v.end());
    sort(v.rbegin(), v.rend());
    sort(v.begin(), v.end());
    sort(v.rbegin(), v.rend());
}