A demonstration of repeatable, non-intrusive measurement of program performance and compiler optimization in Linux using IN-Tune

Collecting accurate program metrics is often complicated by environmental a rtifacts such as operating system workload, cache operation, and processor configuration. This paper demonstrates the ability of the IN-Tune system to make accurate and repeatable measurements of program metrics by analyzing the computational workload of programs in the SPEC95 benchmark suite. It sh ows that metrics which are characteristic of program performance can be col lected in both lightly loaded and heavily loaded environments without corru ption, The IN-Tone system accomplishes this by creating unique 'virtual per formance registers' for each process or kernel thread monitored on an Intel processor. Further, this paper investigates the effect optimization has on the performance of the benchmarks, The results clearly show improvements i n the quality of code generated by the compiler when optimizations are perf ormed and that, whereas measurements of time can be misleading, the IN-Tune measurements are not, Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.