Paul Mackerras 051ae7f734 perf_counter tools: Reduce perf stat measurement overhead/skew ... Vince Weaver reported a 'perf stat' measurement overhead in the count of retired instructions, which can amount to a +6000 instructions inflated count in the reported count. At present, perf stat creates its counters on the perf process. Thus the counters count the fork and various other activity in both the parent and child, such as the resolver overhead for resolving PLT entries for any libc functions that haven't been called before, such as execvp. This reduces the overhead by creating the counters on the child process after the fork, using a couple of pipes to synchronize so that the child process waits until the parent has created the counters before doing the exec. To eliminate the PLT resolution overhead on calling execvp, this does a dummy execvp first which will always fail. With this, the overhead of executing a program goes down from over 4800 instructions to about 90 instructions on powerpc (32-bit). This was measured with a statically-linked program written in assembler which only does the 3 instructions needed to call _exit(0). Before: $ perf stat -e 0:1:u ./three Performance counter stats for './three': 4858 instructions 0.001274523 seconds time elapsed After: $ perf stat -e 0:1:u ./three Performance counter stats for './three': 92 instructions 0.000468153 seconds time elapsed Reported-by: Vince Weaver <vince@deater.net> Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> LKML-Reference: <19016.41425.814043.870352@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>		2009-06-29 22:38:09 +02:00
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perf	perf_counter tools: Reduce perf stat measurement overhead/skew	2009-06-29 22:38:09 +02:00