The Architecture of SPOT

SPOT uses several tools to collect data and generate its report.

• The rpic tool collects performance counter information over the run of a program and produces a text summary of the stall time that each processor event contributed to the run time of the program. For example, it reports the number of seconds spent waiting for data located in memory.

• The Binary Improvement Tool (BIT) instruments an application (provided it is compiled as described in Binaries Must Be Prepared Correctly) and generates information on the number of times each routine is called, the number of times each individual instruction is executed, and the instruction frequency for each assembly language instruction.

• The collect tool is used by SPOT to profile the application over time and, when you request extended information, profile where the processor events occur.

• The bw tool collects system-wide bandwidth utilization data (if possible for the target platform) when you request extended data and are running SPOT with root privileges.

• The traps tool is a wrapper for trapstat, which is included in the Oracle Solaris operating system. It collects trap data when you request extended data and are running SPOT with root privileges.

• The er_html tool is a wrapper for the er_print tool, which generates a set of hyperlinked HTML files from a Performance Analyzer experiment (the data collected by the collect tool and the BIT tool).

• The spot_diff tool produces a report that compares multiple SPOT reports.

You can run each of these tools as a stand-alone tool. Only er_html and spot_diff produce HTML output when run them outside of SPOT.