A computer implemented method, apparatus, and computer usable medium for gathering performance related data in a multiprocessing environment. Instrumentation code is executed on a processor that minimizes the distortion to the processor resources used to execute the program to be profiled. Data is written by the instrumentation code to a shared memory in response to an event occurring during execution of the program. The data is generated during execution of the program on the processor and the instrumentation code uses shared memory to convey the data to a profiling application running on a set of profiling processors. The data is collected by the set of profiling processors in the shared memory written by the instrumentation code.