What profiling tool for Linux requires very little overhead?

Question

I need a tool to profile a Linux application, but I can't seem to find any that have little overhead. (By overhead, I mean require a large download or disk space once installed.)

I looked at valgrind but it seems to require the debug version of libc6 - not a small download.

All I need the tool to do is track the amount of time it takes the application to execute. (Including only the time the application is executing instructions, not task switching, etc.)

Answer 1

So it seems the answer was very simple.

All I had to do was prefix the command with 'time'.

Example:

time ls

...

real    0m0.005s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.000s