5.5. Graphical time/allocation profile
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## 5.5. Graphical time/allocation profile

You can view the time and allocation profiling graph of your program graphically, using ghcprof. This is a new tool with GHC 4.08, and will eventually be the de-facto standard way of viewing GHC profiles[6]

To run ghcprof, you need daVinci™ installed, which can be obtained from The Graph Visualisation Tool daVinci. Install one of the binary distributions[7], and set your `DAVINCIHOME` environment variable to point to the installation directory.

ghcprof uses an XML-based profiling log format, and you therefore need to run your program with a different option: `-px`. The file generated is still called `<prog>.prof`. To see the profile, run ghcprof like this:

    $ ghcprof <prog>.prof

which should pop up a window showing the call-graph of your program in glorious detail. More information on using ghcprof can be found at The Cost-Centre Stack Profiling Tool for GHC.

[6] Actually this isn't true any more, we are working on a new tool for displaying heap profiles using Gtk+HS, so ghcprof may go away at some point in the future.

[7] daVinci™ is sadly not open-source :-(.

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