Perf (Linux)

perf (sometimes called perf_events or perf tools, originally Performance Counters for Linux, PCL) is a performance analyzing tool in Linux, available from Linux kernel version 2.6.31 in 2009. Userspace controlling utility, named perf, is accessed from the command line and provides a number of subcommands; it is capable of statistical profiling of the entire system (both kernel and userland code).

It supports hardware performance counters, tracepoints, software performance counters (e.g. hrtimer), and dynamic probes (for example, kprobes or uprobes). In 2012, two IBM engineers recognized perf (along with OProfile) as one of the two most commonly used performance counter profiling tools on Linux.