Analyzing Program Performance with Sun WorkShop

Chapter 1

Overview of Performance Profiling and Analysis Tools

Developing high performance applications requires a combination of compiler features, libraries of optimized routines, and tools that you use to analyze and isolate code. Analyzing Program Performance With Sun WorkShop describes the tools that are available to help you achieve the goal of isolating and analyzing your code.

This manual deals primarily with the Sampling Collector and Sampling Analyzer, a pair of tools that you use to collect and analyze performance data for your application:

• The Sampling Collector collects performance data (statistical profiles of call stacks, thread-synchronization delay events, hardware-counter overflow profiles, address space data, and summary information for the operating system), and stores it in an experiment file. See Chapter 3 for detailed information about the Sampling Collector.
• The Sampling Analyzer displays the data recorded by the Sampling Collector, so you can examine the information. The Analyzer processes the data and displays various metrics of performance at function, caller-callee, source-line, disassembly-instruction, and program levels. See Chapter 4 for detailed information about the Sa mpling Analyzer.

  The Sampling Analyzer can also help you to fine-tune your application's performance by creating a mapfile that you can use to improve the order of function loading in the application address space.

The Collector and Analyzer are designed for use by any software developer, even if performance tuning is not the developer's main responsibility.

Command-line equivalents of the Collector and Analyzer are available:

• dbx includes a data-collection feature that has the same functionality as the Collector. See Starting a Process Under the Collector in dbx.
• The command-line utility er_print, which prints out an ASCII version of the various Analyzer displays, operates as a command-line sampling analyzer. See Chapter 5 for more information.

The Sampling Collector and Sampling Analyzer are included in the following Sun Workshop^TM products:

• Sun WorkShop Professional^TM C
• Sun Visual WorkShop^TM C++
• Sun Performance WorkShop^TMM Fortran
• Sun WorkShop^TM University Edition

This manual also includes information about the following performance tools:

• LoopTool and LoopReport

  LoopTool is a loop analysis tool that supports performance tuning of automatically parallelized programs. LoopReport is the command line version of LoopTool. See Chapter 7 for more information.

• prof, gprof, and tcov

  prof and gprof are traditional tools for generating profile data and are included with Solaris^TM versions 2.6, 7, and 8 of the Solaris SPARC^TM Platform Edition and Solaris Intel Platform Edition.

  tcov is a code coverage tool. It is included in Sun Workshop.

  For more information about prof, gprof, and tcov, see Appendix A.