Simple Performance Optimization Tool (SPOT)

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The Simple Performance Optimization Tool (SPOT) can help you diagnose performance problems in an application. SPOT runs a set of performance tools on an application and produces web pages to report the data gathered by the tools. The tools can also be run independently of SPOT.

SPOT is complementary to the Oracle Solaris Studio Performance Analyzer. Performance Analyzer tells you where the time was spent in running your application. In certain situations, however, you may need more information to help diagnose your application's problems. SPOT can assist you in these situations.

SPOT uses the collect utility as one of its tools. SPOT uses the er_print utility and an additional utility called er_html to display the profiling data as a web page.

Before you use SPOT, the application binary should be compiled with some level of optimization with the –O option and debugging information with the –g option to enable the SPOT tools to map performance information to lines of code.

SPOT can be used to gather performance data by launching an application or attaching to an already running application.

To run SPOT and launch your application:

% spot executable

To run SPOT on an already running application:

% spot -P process-id

SPOT produces a report for each run of your application, as well as a report that compares SPOT data from different runs.

When SPOT is used on a PID, multiple tools are attached to the PID in sequence to generate the report.

The following figure shows part of the SPOT run report, which shows information about the system on which SPOT was run, and about how the application was compiled. The report includes links to other pages with more information.

The SPOT report web pages are linked together to make it easy for you to examine all the data complied.

For more information, see the Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2: Simple Performance Optimization Tool (SPOT) User’s Guide in the Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2 documentation library at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E18659_01/index.html.