What is a good easy to use profiler for C++ on Linux?

Use gprof.

Just compile with -pg flag (I think (but am not sure) you have to turn of optimizations though.) and use gprof to analyze the gmon.out file that your executable will then produce.

eg:

gcc -pg -o whatever whatever.c

./whatever

gprof whatever gmon.out

Same thing with g++ and cpp.

valgrind is a well-know linux profiler

Zoom from RotateRight ( http://www.rotateright.com ) is what I've been using. It has a butterfly view of functions and you can double-click any function to dive into source or asm code. Build with debugging information (-g) to see your source, but you should still build and profile optimized code.

I'm a fan of Oprofile. It involves installing a kernel module and has a bit of a learning curve to it, but it's fairly powerful and works very well for optimized programs/programs without debugging symbols.

Vtune is another very powerful profiler made by Intel. I believe the Linux version is free for Non-commercial software.

There is also the Valgrind suite of tools proposed by dfa. Callgrind would probably be what you're most interested in. Cachegrind(whose featureset is a subset of Callgrind's) and Massif are interesting as well, but I have no experience with the latter.

Google also has a nice profiler as part of the google-perftools -- which are included in Debian / Ubuntu and possibly other distros.

Take a look at KCacheGrind which is a graphical frontend to valgrind and makes it really easy to use it.

gprof is the standard gnu tool for profiling.

This is what I use.