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diff --git a/tools/perf/Documentation/cpu-and-latency-overheads.txt b/tools/perf/Documentation/cpu-and-latency-overheads.txt new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..3b6d63705465 --- /dev/null +++ b/tools/perf/Documentation/cpu-and-latency-overheads.txt @@ -0,0 +1,85 @@ +CPU and latency overheads +------------------------- +There are two notions of time: wall-clock time and CPU time. +For a single-threaded program, or a program running on a single-core machine, +these notions are the same. However, for a multi-threaded/multi-process program +running on a multi-core machine, these notions are significantly different. +Each second of wall-clock time we have number-of-cores seconds of CPU time. +Perf can measure overhead for both of these times (shown in 'overhead' and +'latency' columns for CPU and wall-clock time correspondingly). + +Optimizing CPU overhead is useful to improve 'throughput', while optimizing +latency overhead is useful to improve 'latency'. It's important to understand +which one is useful in a concrete situation at hand. For example, the former +may be useful to improve max throughput of a CI build server that runs on 100% +CPU utilization, while the latter may be useful to improve user-perceived +latency of a single interactive program build. +These overheads may be significantly different in some cases. For example, +consider a program that executes function 'foo' for 9 seconds with 1 thread, +and then executes function 'bar' for 1 second with 128 threads (consumes +128 seconds of CPU time). The CPU overhead is: 'foo' - 6.6%, 'bar' - 93.4%. +While the latency overhead is: 'foo' - 90%, 'bar' - 10%. If we try to optimize +running time of the program looking at the (wrong in this case) CPU overhead, +we would concentrate on the function 'bar', but it can yield only 10% running +time improvement at best. + +By default, perf shows only CPU overhead. To show latency overhead, use +'perf record --latency' and 'perf report': + +----------------------------------- +Overhead Latency Command + 93.88% 25.79% cc1 + 1.90% 39.87% gzip + 0.99% 10.16% dpkg-deb + 0.57% 1.00% as + 0.40% 0.46% sh +----------------------------------- + +To sort by latency overhead, use 'perf report --latency': + +----------------------------------- +Latency Overhead Command + 39.87% 1.90% gzip + 25.79% 93.88% cc1 + 10.16% 0.99% dpkg-deb + 4.17% 0.29% git + 2.81% 0.11% objtool +----------------------------------- + +To get insight into the difference between the overheads, you may check +parallelization histogram with '--sort=latency,parallelism,comm,symbol --hierarchy' +flags. It shows fraction of (wall-clock) time the workload utilizes different +numbers of cores ('Parallelism' column). For example, in the following case +the workload utilizes only 1 core most of the time, but also has some +highly-parallel phases, which explains significant difference between +CPU and wall-clock overheads: + +----------------------------------- + Latency Overhead Parallelism / Command / Symbol ++ 56.98% 2.29% 1 ++ 16.94% 1.36% 2 ++ 4.00% 20.13% 125 ++ 3.66% 18.25% 124 ++ 3.48% 17.66% 126 ++ 3.26% 0.39% 3 ++ 2.61% 12.93% 123 +----------------------------------- + +By expanding corresponding lines, you may see what commands/functions run +at the given parallelism level: + +----------------------------------- + Latency Overhead Parallelism / Command / Symbol +- 56.98% 2.29% 1 + 32.80% 1.32% gzip + 4.46% 0.18% cc1 + 2.81% 0.11% objtool + 2.43% 0.10% dpkg-source + 2.22% 0.09% ld + 2.10% 0.08% dpkg-genchanges +----------------------------------- + +To see the normal function-level profile for particular parallelism levels +(number of threads actively running on CPUs), you may use '--parallelism' +filter. For example, to see the profile only for low parallelism phases +of a workload use '--latency --parallelism=1-2' flags. |