If you're attempting a serious attack on profiling you ought to  
include some time looking at how to make profiling work in the face  
of long running primitives. The profiles we get when using  
TimeProfiler et al can be quite innaccurate if the code being  
profiled uses prims that take a long time; the process that  
interrupts to sample the subject code cannot actually interrupt  
inside such a long prim.

I forget how it was tackled but VW has some code to try to improve  
the value of the results, or used to. It is possible that later  
changes have obviated the problem or changed it beyond obvious  
similarity.


tim
-- 
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim