Methods and an apparatus for stride profiling a software application are disclosed. An example system uses a hardware performance counter to report instruction addresses and data addresses associated with memory access instructions triggered by some event, such as a data cache miss. When the same instruction address is associated with more than one data address, the difference between the two data addresses is recorded. When two or more of these data address differences are recorded for the same instruction, the system determines a stride associated with the instruction to be the greatest common divisor of the two or more differences. This stride may be used by a compiler to optimize data cache prefetching. In addition, any overhead associated with monitoring addresses of data cache misses may be reduced by cycling between an inspection phase and a skipping phase. More data cache misses are monitored during the inspection phase than during the skipping phase.