[tracker1]

Profiling in general is a really good thing when you're seeing odd load/timing/performance issues... I once found a project was storing its' configuration settings (loaded/cached from DB) in a really badly performing way, an in-memory datatable, with text queries instead of a hashtable (not my design).

A single call wasn't so bad, but the lookup was happening many hundreds of times per request adding seconds to some requests. Wild how much difference a relatively small thing can make.

[surrealvortex]

That brings up another distinction - profilers don't distinguish between a method that takes very little time to run but is called very often and another method that is pretty expensive, but is not called very often.

Ultimately, we do care about the total time taken, but the approaches necessary for the two cases above are very different. In many cases, the method that is simply called very often will call for some type of caching solution in the caller, while the more expensive method will require retooling within the method itself.