A method of acquiring software profile information of a target software application includes Monitoring an application program for system calls, detecting a system call of interest to the user, acquiring stack information, and processing the call stack information to produce statistical information concerning function calls. The call stack information includes program counter and other information which is derived from the target application as well as operating system. The call stack information may be recorded. The statistical information includes statistics concerning the number of samples that any one function call is at a top of the call stack information, the number of samples that a series of functions calls are included in the call stack information, and the number of samples that a set of function calls are at the top of the call stack information.