Flame graphs are a visualization of profiled software, allowing the most frequent code-paths to be identified quickly and accurately. They can be generated using my open source programs, which create interactive SVGs. See the Updates section for other implementations. Recently I've been helping with d3-flame-graph. The x-axis shows the stack profile population, sorted alphabetically (it is not the passage of time), and the y-axis shows stack depth, counting from zero at the bottom. Each rectangle represents a stack frame. The wider a frame is is, the more often it was present in the stacks. The top edge shows what is on-CPU, and beneath it is its ancestry. The colors are usually not significant, picked randomly to differentiate frames. Flame charts were first added by Google Chrome's WebKit Web Inspector (bug). While inspired by flame graphs, flame charts put the passage of time on the x-axis instead of the alphabet.