A demonstration of repeatable, non-intrusive measurement of program performance and compiler optimization in Linux using IN-Tune
✍ Scribed by W. E. Cohen; R. K. Gaede; J. B. Rodgers
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 78 KB
- Volume
- 30
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0038-0644
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Collecting accurate program metrics is often complicated by environmental artifacts such as operating system workload, cache operation, and processor configuration. This paper demonstrates the ability of the IN-Tune system to make accurate and repeatable measurements of program metrics by analyzing the computational workload of programs in the SPEC95 benchmark suite. It shows that metrics which are characteristic of program performance can be collected in both lightly loaded and heavily loaded environments without corruption. The IN-Tune system accomplishes this by creating unique 'virtual performance registers' for each process or kernel thread monitored on an Intel processor. Further, this paper investigates the effect optimization has on the performance of the benchmarks. The results clearly show improvements in the quality of code generated by the compiler when optimizations are performed and that, whereas measurements of time can be misleading, the IN-Tune measurements are not.