Profiling a storage engine

[Slava Akhmechet]

Hi,

We're at a point where we need to understand performance bottlenecks
of our storage engine and we're not sure how to proceed. What is the
best way to do profiling? We are running benchmarks that compare our
performance, cpu utilization, and IO throughput to MyISAM. We're also
using procsystime to give us a picture of how much time we spend on
various system calls. However, we're not sure how to best make sense
of the numbers. We'd like to run gprof, but we're not sure how to
compile MySQL to support it, and whether it will give realistic
numbers.

We'd appreciate if anyone could share their experience on how to
effectively profile a storage engine.

Regards,
- Slava