Simple Performance Optimization Tool (SPOT) 2.0 User's Guide

Chapter 1 Introduction and Installation

This chapter introduces the features of the Simple Performance Optimization Tool (SPOT), and contains the following sections:

Introduction

SPOT was written to help diagnose performance problems that can limit the speed of an application. The role of SPOT is complementary to running the application under the Sun™ Studio Performance Analyzer, and looking at the resulting experiment. The profile generated by Analyzer will tell you where the time was spent in running your application. In certain situations, however, you may not be able to diagnose your application’s problems just by examining its profile.

For example, some problems that cannot easily be solved by inspecting the application profile include:

Is the time spent in the routine high because the routine itself is slow, or because the routine is called a large number of times?
Is a line of code taking time because it misses cache or because it misses the translation lookaside buffer (TLB)?
Are traps slowing down the application?
Is the application reaching a memory bandwidth limit?

While you may be able to identify the cause of these issues by looking at the application’s profile and running additional tools, you may not know what tools are available or which specific tool to use.

SPOT simplifies the entire process of performance analysis by running an application under a common set of tools and producing an HTML report of its findings. This provides the following benefits:

By creating HTML reports, SPOT enables the reports to be placed on a server that can be accessed by an entire development team. For example, a SPOT report can be examined by remote colleagues, or referred to during a meeting. You could even email a URL of a particular line of source code, or disassembly, to a colleague for further review.
The SPOT report archives the compiler build commands as well as the profile for the active parts of the application. By comparing the current application profile with an older profile, you can easily check for either changed code or changed compiler build flags.
SPOT can also profile the application according to the most frequently occuring hardware events; this indicates which routines are encountering which problems.

Supported Platforms

SPOT is available for both SPARC and x86 platforms. The specific details included in the report are platform dependent. Not all the tools used by SPOT are available for all platforms: instruction count data, bandwidth data, and trap data are not available on the x86 platform.

Downloading and Installing the Software

You can download the Simple Performance Optimization Tool software packages from the Cool Tools web site (http://cooltools.sunsource.net/) or from the Sun Download Center (http://www.sun.com/download/). In the Sun Download Center, the software can be found in the Development Tools section of the Application Development category.

The SPOT software is distributed as part of the CMT Developer Tools. The download is a single tar file that contains two packages SPROprfns and SPROcool. Both of these software packages should be installed into the same directory as the Sun Studio 12 compiler, which must be installed prior to installing the CMT Developer Tool software. (By default, the Sun Studio 12 compiler software is usually installed in the /opt/SUNWspro/ directory.)

The following commands assume that the tar file containing the CMT Developer Tools has been downloaded into the /tmp directory. Installing a package requires root privileges

# cd /tmp
# tar xvf SPROcmt.SPARCV9.tar
x SPROcool, 0 bytes, 0 tape blocks
x SPROcool/pkgmap, 4339 bytes, 9 tape blocks
x SPROcool/pkginfo, 463 bytes, 1 tape blocks
x SPROcool/reloc, 0 bytes, 0 tape blocks
...
x SPROprfns/install/i.none, 2053 bytes, 5 tape blocks
x SPROprfns/archive, 0 bytes, 0 tape blocks
x SPROprfns/archive/none, 19960117 bytes, 38985 tape blocks

Refer to the pkgadd(1M) man page for additional information about installing software packages. The command ”pkgadd -d . SPROprfns SPROcool” should be used to install the packages. Answer ”y’ to the prompts from pkgadd. The pkgadd command requires root permissions. The order that the packages are installed is important.

% pkgadd -d . SPROprfns SPROcool

Processing package instance <SPROprfns> from </tmp>

Sun Studio 12 Non-ship commands for Performance Analyzer
(sparc) 12.0,REV=2007.05.29
Copyright 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Using </opt> as the package base directory.
## Processing package information.
## Processing system information.
   22 package pathnames are already properly installed.
## Verifying package dependencies.
## Verifying disk space requirements.
## Checking for conflicts with packages already installed.
## Checking for setuid/setgid programs.

This package contains scripts which will be executed with super-user
permission during the process of installing this package.

Do you want to continue with the installation of <SPROprfns> [y,n,?] y

Installing Sun Studio 12 Non-ship commands for Performance Analyzer as <SPROprfns>

## Installing part 1 of 1.
## Executing postinstall script.

Installation of <SPROprfns> was successful.

Processing package instance <SPROcool> from </tmp>

Cool Tools
(sparc) 12.0,REV=2007.06.19
Copyright 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Using </opt> as the package base directory.
## Processing package information.
## Processing system information.
   30 package pathnames are already properly installed.
## Verifying package dependencies.
## Verifying disk space requirements.
## Checking for conflicts with packages already installed.
## Checking for setuid/setgid programs.

This package contains scripts which will be executed with super-user
permission during the process of installing this package.

Do you want to continue with the installation of <SPROcool> [y,n,?] y

Installing Cool Tools as <SPROcool>

## Installing part 1 of 1.
## Executing postinstall script.

Installation of <SPROcool> was successful.

The following commands will be installed into the /opt/SUNWspro/extra/bin directory:

spot, er_html, bit, bw, traps, ripc, spot_diff

Note –

Several SPOT tools will generate graphs if they find gnuplot in the current path. However, the gnuplot software is not included with the SPOT software and must be installed separately.

The current version of SPOT is 2.0, which is designed to work with Sun Studio 12. The previous version of SPOT was 1.0, which was designed to work with Sun Studio 11.

Uninstalling the Software

To remove the SPOT software packages, type the following command as superuser:

# sudo pkgrm SPROcool SPROprfns

The following package is currently installed:
   SPROcool        Cool Tools
                   (sparc) 12.0,REV=2007.06.19

Do you want to remove this package? [y,n,?,q] y

## Removing installed package instance <SPROcool>

This package contains scripts which will be executed with super-user
permission during the process of removing this package.

Do you want to continue with the removal of this package [y,n,?,q] y
## Verifying package dependencies.
## Processing package information.
## Executing preremove script.
## Removing pathnames in class <none>

....
The following package is currently installed:
   SPROprfns       Sun Studio 12 Non-ship commands for Performance Analyzer
                   (sparc) 12.0,REV=2007.05.29

Do you want to remove this package? [y,n,?,q] y

## Removing installed package instance <SPROprfns>

This package contains scripts which will be executed with super-user
permission during the process of removing this package.

Do you want to continue with the removal of this package [y,n,?,q] y
## Verifying package dependencies.
## Processing package information.
## Executing preremove script.
## Removing pathnames in class <none>

...

Removal of <SPROprfns> was successful.

Refer to the pkgrm(1M) man page for more information about uninstalling software packages.

Since the SPOT software is installed on top of the Sun Studio 12 compiler, uninstall the SPOT software before uninstalling the Sun Studio 12 compiler software.

Note –

Installing or uninstalling the SPOT software will not affect or interfere with any Sun Studio 12 compiler software files.

Support

The SPOT software is not a supported Sun product, so there are no formal support mechanisms. However, at the OpenSPARC forums, you can ask the user community questions about the tools or intepreting the results of the tools, or provide suggestions for improvement. The Cool Tools forum is located at:

http://forum.sun.com/forum.jspa?forumID=283

Because the OpenSPARC forums are user supported, there is no guarantee that every question will be answered.