Sometimes it is useful to save samples at a specific time. For example, when profiling an executable, it may be useful to gather different samples based on different input data sets. If the number of events to be monitored exceeds the number of counters available for the processor, multiple runs of OProfile can be used to collect data, saving the sample data to different files each time.

To save the current set of sample files, execute the following command, replacing <name> with a unique descriptive name for the current session.

opcontrol --save=<name>

The directory /var/lib/oprofile/samples/name/ is created and the current sample files are copied to it.