Darryl Gove's blog
Fishing with cputrack
I'm a great fan of the hardware performance counters that you find on most processors. Often you can look at the profile and instantly identify what the issue is. Sometimes though, it is not obvious, and that's where the performance counters can really help out.
I was looking at one such issue last week, the performance of the application was showing some variation, and it wasn't immediately obvious what the issue was. The usual suspects in these cases are:
- Excessive system time
- Process migration
- Memory placement
- Page size
- etc.
Unfortunately, none of these seemed to explain the issue. So I hacked together the following script cputrackall which ran the test code under cputrack for all the possible performance counters. Dumped the output into a spreadsheet, and compared the fast and slow runs of the app. This is something of a "fishing trip" script, just gathering as much data as possible in the hope that something leaps out, but sometimes that's exactly what's needed. I regularly get to sit in front of a new chip before the tools like ripc have been ported, and in those situations the easiest thing to do is to look for hardware counter events that might explain the runtime performance. In this particular instance, it helped me to confirm my suspicion that there was a difference in branch misprediction rates that was causing the issue.
Posted at 08:00AM Oct 19, 2009 by Darryl Gove in Sun | Comments[0]
