This manual describes the Collector and Performance Analyzer, a pair of tools that you use to collect and analyze performance data for your application. The manual also describes the er_print utility, a command-line tool for displaying and analyzing collected performance data in text form. Performance Analyzer and the er_print utility show mostly the same data, but use different user interfaces.
The Collector and Performance Analyzer are designed for use by any software developer, even if performance tuning is not the developer’s main responsibility. These tools provide a more flexible, detailed, and accurate analysis than the commonly used profiling tools prof and gprof and are not subject to an attribution error in gprof.
The Collector and Performance Analyzer tools help to answer the following kinds of questions:
How much of the available resources does the program consume?
Which functions or load objects are consuming the most resources?
Which source lines and instructions are responsible for resource consumption?
How did the program arrive at this point in the execution?
Which resources are being consumed by a function or load object?