Continuous profiling: Where have all the cycles gone?
Anderson JM, Berc LM, Dean J, Ghemawat S, Henzinger MH, Leung S-TA, Sites RL, Vandevoorde MT, Waldspurger CA, Weihl WE. 1997. Continuous profiling: Where have all the cycles gone? ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. 15(4), 357–390.
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Journal Article
| Published
| English
Scopus indexed
Author
Anderson, Jennifer M.;
Berc, Lance M.;
Dean, Jeffrey;
Ghemawat, Sanjay;
Henzinger, MonikaISTA 
;
Leung, Shun-Tak A.;
Sites, Richard L.;
Vandevoorde, Mark T.;
Waldspurger, Carl A.;
Weihl, William E.
;
Leung, Shun-Tak A.;
Sites, Richard L.;
Vandevoorde, Mark T.;
Waldspurger, Carl A.;
Weihl, William E.Abstract
This article describes the Digital Continuous Profiling Infrastructure, a sampling-based profiling system designed to run continuously on production systems. The system supports multiprocessors, works on unmodified executables, and collects profiles for entire systems, including user programs, shared libraries, and the operating system kernel. Samples are collected at a high rate (over 5200 samples/sec. per 333MHz processor), yet with low overhead (1–3% slowdown for most workloads). Analysis tools supplied with the profiling system use the sample data to produce a precise and accurate accounting, down to the level of pipeline stalls incurred by individual instructions, of where time is bring spent. When instructions incur stalls, the tools identify possible reasons, such as cache misses, branch mispredictions, and functional unit contention. The fine-grained instruction-level analysis guides users and automated optimizers to the causes of performance problems and provides important insights for fixing them.
Publishing Year
Date Published
1997-11-01
Journal Title
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Mike Burrows, Allan Heydon, Hal Murray, Sharon Perl, and Sharon Smith for helpful comments that greatly improved the content and presentation of this article; the anonymous referees for SOSP and TOCS also provided numerous helpful comments. We would also like to thank Dawson Engler for initially suggesting the use of interprocessor interrupts to avoid expensive synchronization operations in the interrupt handler, Mitch Lichtenberg for his work on the Alpha/NT version of our system and in general for his help and suggestions on the project, and the developers of iprobe for supplying us with source code that helped us get off the ground in building the early versions of our data collection system. Finally, we would like to thank Gary Carleton and Bob Davies of Intel for answering our questions about VTune and Marty Itzkowitz of SGI for answering our questions about SpeedShop.
Volume
15
Issue
4
Page
357-390
ISSN
eISSN
IST-REx-ID
Cite this
Anderson JM, Berc LM, Dean J, et al. Continuous profiling: Where have all the cycles gone? ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. 1997;15(4):357-390. doi:10.1145/265924.265925
Anderson, J. M., Berc, L. M., Dean, J., Ghemawat, S., Henzinger, M. H., Leung, S.-T. A., … Weihl, W. E. (1997). Continuous profiling: Where have all the cycles gone? ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/265924.265925
Anderson, Jennifer M., Lance M. Berc, Jeffrey Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Monika H Henzinger, Shun-Tak A. Leung, Richard L. Sites, Mark T. Vandevoorde, Carl A. Waldspurger, and William E. Weihl. “Continuous Profiling: Where Have All the Cycles Gone?” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, 1997. https://doi.org/10.1145/265924.265925.
J. M. Anderson et al., “Continuous profiling: Where have all the cycles gone?,” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 15, no. 4. Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 357–390, 1997.
Anderson JM, Berc LM, Dean J, Ghemawat S, Henzinger MH, Leung S-TA, Sites RL, Vandevoorde MT, Waldspurger CA, Weihl WE. 1997. Continuous profiling: Where have all the cycles gone? ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. 15(4), 357–390.
Anderson, Jennifer M., et al. “Continuous Profiling: Where Have All the Cycles Gone?” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 15, no. 4, Association for Computing Machinery, 1997, pp. 357–90, doi:10.1145/265924.265925.
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