Analyzing Program Performance With Sun WorkShop

The Statistics Display

The Statistics display (see Figure 2-9) provides data about your application's overall performance and system resource usage (as opposed to the Histogram, Cumulative, and Address Space display options, which show data broken down by program components such as functions and pages). The information provided by the Statistics display is useful when you want to compare actual numerical values against any previous estimates you may have made.

Figure 2-9 Display of Program Execution Statistics

The information needed to produce the Statistics display is always collected by the Sampling Collector during the data collection process, so you do not need to specify any particular data type to view information in this display. The Statistics display shows:

Minor Page Faults	The number of page faults serviced that do not require any physical I/O activity
Major Page Faults	The number of page faults serviced that require physical I/O activity (if non-zero, the Overview display shows text page or data page fault wait time)
Process swaps	The number of times a process is swapped out of main memory
Input blocks	The number of times a read() system call is performed on a non-character or special file
Output blocks	The number of times a write() system call is performed on a non-character or special file
Messages sent	The number of messages sent over sockets
Messages received	The number of messages received from sockets
Signals handled	The number of signals delivered or received
Voluntary context switches	The number of times a context switch occurred because a process voluntarily gave up the processor before its allotted time was completed, to wait for availability of a resource
Involuntary context switches	The number of times a context switch occurred because a higher-priority process became runnable, or because the current process exceeded its allotted time
System calls	The total number of system calls
Characters of I/O	The number of characters transferred in or out to a character device or file by read and write calls
Total address space size	Total size of the address space (in pages)
Maximum address space size	Maximum size of the address space (pages per sample)
Minimum address space size	Minimum size of the address space (pages per sample)
Average address space size	Average size of the address space (pages per sample)
Total text address space size	Total size of the text address space (pages)
Maximum text address space size	Maximum size of the text address space (pages per sample)
Minimum text address space size	Minimum size of the text address space (pages per sample)
Average text address space size	Average size of the text address space (pages per sample)
Total non-text address space size	Total size of the non-text address space (pages)
Maximum non-text address space size	Maximum size of the non-text address space (pages per sample)
Minimum non--text address space size	Minimum size of the non-text address space (pages per sample)
Average non-text address space size	Average size of the non-text address space (pages per sample)

Note -

Workset sizes will be non-zero only if address-space data was collected.

You can select which samples to include in the Statistics display in three ways:

Type sample numbers directly into the Includes Samples text field: separate numbers with commas (1,3,6), and define ranges using a hyphen (1-6).
Select the columns containing those samples while still in the Overview display.
Choose either View Select or View Select None while still in the Overview display to include or exclude all samples in the experiment.