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Nested or Recursive Calls

The profiler attempts to compensate for nested or recursive calls. Time and consing overhead will be charged to the dynamically innermost (most recent) call to a profiled function. So profiling a subfunction of a profiled function will cause the reported time for the outer function to decrease. However if an inner function has a large number of calls, some of the profiling overhead may ``leak'' into the reported time for the outer function. In general, be wary of profiling short functions that are called many times.



Peter Van Eynde 2000-02-08