Gprof is a software tool used for profiling the performance of programs, with the goal of identifying areas of the code that can be optimized to improve overall performance. It provides information about how much time is spent in each function of a program, as well as statistics on various parameters like call counts, CPU cycles, and memory usage. With this data, developers can determine which parts of their code are causing performance bottlenecks and take steps to optimize them. Gprof is commonly used in software development for performance tuning and debugging.