What is Iprobe?
Iprobe is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Iprobe is a low-overhead tool suite that uses the Alpha event counters to find performance bottlenecks in kernel and user space.
The Compaq Alpha processor has some nifty on-chip performance hardware which can be used to find bottlenecks in program code. Iprobe gives the user access to this hardware.
The iprobe suite allows one to pinpoint problem code. It can not only determine where a program is spending its cycles, but it can also figure out where caches misses and floating point instructions occur. A few of the questions that Iprobe can help to answer are: Where is my program missing the cache? Where is my program spending all of its cycles? Which branch path is taken most often?
Internally, Iprobe has been used to optimize performance in CPU benchmarks, on all Alpha operating systems, and several commercial databases.
Iprobe has traditionally be a cross-platform Alpha tool. It runs on Digital Unix, Open VMS, and Windows NT, and it is now being released under GPL for Alpha/Linux.
Iprobe was brought to you by Compaq's
High Performance Servers Division/ Benchmark Performance Engineering
(And the number 7)
If you have any questions or comment feel free to email Phil
Ezolt:
ezolt@perf.zko.dec.com or Phillip.Ezolt@compaq.com