11.1 What the profiler does

With the profiler running, the Lisp process is interrupted regularly at a specified time interval until the profiler is turned off. Having halted the execution of the process the profiler scans the execution stack and records the name of every function found. A special note is made of which function is at the top of the stack. When profiling stops the profiler presents aggregated information about each function as follows:

• The number of times the function was called.
• The number of times the function was found on the stack by the profiler, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the total number of scans of the stack.
• The number of times the function was found on the top of the stack, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the total number of scans of the stack.