SLIME - How to Profile in Lisp

If you have worked on a fairly *BIG* project you must have heard people saying, "Let's profile it first." When I started lisp programming I was clueless about profiling a lisp code. This was fairly easy in other programming languages by the tools they provide; I knew how to profile C/C++ code with GCC compiler options but not for lisp.
Here I am going to explain how to profile lisp codes using SLIME.
Suppose you have a function:

(defun foo()
(format t "Hello foo"))

and you call it like:

(loop for n
from 1 to 1000
do(progn
(print n)
(foo)))

Now you have to find how much time foo has taken. Below are the steps for that:

• Run the command: M-x slime-toggle-profile-fdefinition and hit enter. It will ask you the function name you want to profile. Enter the function name (foo in our case) you want to profile.
• Now run the function; as in our example we will run the loop for getting more data.

• To see the profile data use command M-x slime-profile-report. This will show the profiled data in the format below:

seconds consed calls sec/call name
-----------------------------------------------------
0.015 587,712 1,000 0.000015 FOO
-----------------------------------------------------
0.015 587,712 1,000 Total

estimated total profiling overhead: .002 seconds
overhead estimation parameters:
0.0s/call, 2.03e-6s total profiling, 9.36e-7s internal profiling

There is profiling options for packages. For more details you can refer to SLIME Manual.

SLIME Setup for Windows

If you are trying to setup SLIME in Windows it is fairly a simple job now.

I have used SBCL version 1.0.6 and XEmacs 21.4.20 in this example.

Following are the steps that you need to perform for a minimal setup of SLIME:

1. Download and install XEmacs.

2. Download and install SBCL in a directory, say C:\SBCL.

3. Download and unzip SLIME in a directory, say C:\SLIME. Make sure you have the directory names noted correctly.

4. Edit your init.el file and put the following lisp codes there:

(setq inferior-lisp-program "c:/sbcl/sbcl.exe")
(add-to-list 'load-path "c:/home/site/slime-2.0/")
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup)

This is it you sould have the SLIME working for you. :-)