A temporal profiling framework useful for dynamic optimization with hot data stream prefetching provides profiling of longer bursts and lower overhead. For profiling longer bursts, the framework employs a profiling phase counter, as well as a checking phase counter, to control transitions to and from instrumented code for sampling bursts of a program execution trace. The temporal profiling framework further intelligently eliminates some checks at procedure entries and loop back-edges, while still avoiding unbounded execution without executing checks for transition to and from instrumented code. Fast hot data stream detection analyzes a grammar of a profiled data reference sequence, calculating a heat metric for recurring subsequences based on length and number of unique occurrences outside of other hot data streams in the sequence with sufficiently low-overhead to permit use in a dynamic optimization framework.