Use a sampling profiler with support for hardware counters (vtune, instruments, zoom, etc). Configure to take a stack trace every Nth* event on the counter of interest. Run your program under the profiler. Look at the trace with the tree “inverted” or “bottom up” to see exactly which functions are incurring the counter events, which isn’t terribly useful, so look at the functions themselves to see a line-by-line or instruction-by-instruction breakdown of where the events occurred.
(*) What should N be? Depends on how frequently the counter is getting hit. N between 1000 and 1000000 is pretty typical. Choosing prime N is a good idea.
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Use a sampling profiler with support for hardware counters (vtune, instruments, zoom, etc). Configure to take a stack trace every Nth* event on the counter of interest. Run your program under the profiler. Look at the trace with the tree “inverted” or “bottom up” to see exactly which functions are incurring the counter events, which isn’t terribly useful, so look at the functions themselves to see a line-by-line or instruction-by-instruction breakdown of where the events occurred.
(*) What should N be? Depends on how frequently the counter is getting hit. N between 1000 and 1000000 is pretty typical. Choosing prime N is a good idea.