Short introduction to IgProf

IgProf is both a performance profiler and a memory allocation profiler. This exercise will introduce you to the basic mechanics of using IgProf.

Basic profiling environment

To make sure you have technically everything set up right, let’s first create a profile for a simple run of the ls command.

[studentNM@esc-XY ~]$ igprof -pp -z -o ls-test.gz -- ls -laFR /usr/lib >/dev/null
[studentNM@esc-XY ~]$ igprof-analyse --sqlite -d -v -g ls-test.gz |
> sqlite3 ~/public_html/cgi-bin/data/ls-test.sql3

View the report at http://esc-gw.pd.infn.it:61100/~studentNM/cgi-bin/igprof-navigator.py/ls-test/

Basic performance profile

This exercise will run the program from the previous exercise on cputicks using igprof statistical performance profiler.

Run the test program under igprof performance profiler:

[studentNM@esc-XY ~]$ cd esc17/hands-on/basic
[studentNM@esc-XY basic]$ igprof -pp -z -o cputicks.gz ./cputicks 1000000

Generate a simple text profile output of run time:

[studentNM@esc-XY basic]$ igprof-analyse -d -v -g cputicks.gz > cputicks.res
[studentNM@esc-XY basic]$ less -SX cputicks.res
Counter: PERF_TICKS

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Flat profile (cumulative >= 1%)

% total      Total  Function
  100.0       0.11  <spontaneous> [1]
  100.0       0.11  _start [2]
  100.0       0.11  __libc_start_main [3]
  100.0       0.11  main [4]
  100.0       0.11  pi(int) [5]
...

Generate the same profile in a web-viewable database; then view the profile at http://esc-gw.pd.infn.it:61100/~studentNM/cgi-bin/igprof-navigator.py/cputicks/:

[studentNM@esc-XY basic]$ rm -f ~/public_html/cgi-bin/data/cputicks.sql3
[studentNM@esc-XY basic]$ igprof-analyse --sqlite -d -v -g cputicks.gz |
> sqlite3 ~/public_html/cgi-bin/data/cputicks.sql3