sampleprof - Lua Sample Profiling

Sample profiling is a code profiling technique where you randomly stop a program and inspect its current state to learn about it. This approach is faster and less disruptive than observing every line of code as it runs, since observation has overhead. With a reasonable sample size, it's easy to get a clear picture of which parts of the codebase are taking up most of the time, while allowing the code to run almost unaffected.

Usage

The Lua library returns a single function, which takes a function to run, performs sample profiling on it, and gives a table of results. The results table is a mapping from "filename.lua:line" to number of samples. By default, samples are propagated up the callstack, with a decay (0.619).

local sample = require('sampleprof')
local profile = sample(fn)