Capturing usage information

I'd like to record the running of a typical program such as Firefox, GCC, or ffmpeg and capture the calls and arguments to functions like strcpy() and memcpy(). The idea is to generate a usage profile so we can tell what standard library functions and what variants (i.e. aligned/unaligned, small copy/large copy) to attack first.

Does anyone know of existing research with this information, or existing tools that could capture it?

My fallback is to use a LD_PRELOAD trick to replace the interesting functions with tracing versions.

-- Michael