Abstract

The complexity of hardware and software makes it difficult to identify performance problems on computer systems. There can be unexpected interactions between the various software and hardware components that developers are unable to predict. Thus, performance monitoring tools such as OProfile are essential for identifying these performance problems, allowing the programmers to address the problems.
OProfile is a low-overhead, system-wide profiling tool that uses the processor's performance monitoring hardware to characterize programs running on Linux systems. On IA32 processors such as the Intel Pentium III OProfile can indicate which sections of a program have frequent cache misses and pipeline stalls. This talk will demonstrate data collection and tuning techniques with OProfile.