Re: [PATCH 2/3] perf tools: Spare double comparison of callchain first entry

[Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>]

Em Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 06:34:58PM +0100, Frederic Weisbecker escreveu:
> On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 10:17:53AM +0900, Namhyung Kim wrote: 
> > I think if the sort key doesn't contain "symbol", unmatch case would be
> > increased as more various callchains would go into a same entry.
> 
> You mean -g fractal,0.5,callee,address ?
> 
> Hmm, actually I haven't seen much difference there.

I guess he will, but will wait for Namhyung's final ack here, ok?

- Arnaldo
 
> > >
> > >> 
> > >> >
> > >> > This results in less comparisons performed by the CPU.
> > >> 
> > >> Do you have any numbers?  I suspect it'd not be a big change, but just
> > >> curious.
> > >
> > > So I compared before/after the patchset (which include the cursor restore removal)
> > > with:
> > >
> > > 	1) Some big hackbench-like load that generates > 200 MB perf.data
> > >
> > > 	perf record -g -- perf bench sched messaging -l $SOME_BIG_NUMBER
> > >
> > > 	2) Compare before/after with the following reports:
> > >
> > > 	perf stat perf report --stdio > /dev/null
> > > 	perf stat perf report --stdio -s sym > /dev/null
> > > 	perf stat perf report --stdio -G > /dev/null
> > > 	perf stat perf report --stdio -g fractal,0.5,caller,address > /dev/null 
> > >
> > > And most of the time I had < 0.01% difference on time completion in favour of the patchset
> > > (which may be due to the removed cursor restore patch eventually).
> > >
> > > So, all in one, there was no real interesting difference. If you want the true results I can definetly relaunch the tests.
> > 
> > So as an extreme case, could you please also test "-s cpu" case and
> > share the numbers?
> 
> There is indeed a tiny difference here.
> 
> Before the patchset:
> 
> fweisbec@Aivars:~/linux-2.6-tip/tools/perf$ sudo ./perf stat -r 20 ./perf report --stdio -s cpu > /dev/null
> 
>  Performance counter stats for './perf report --stdio -s cpu' (20 runs):
> 
>        3343,047232      task-clock (msec)         #    0,999 CPUs utilized            ( +-  0,12% )
>                  6      context-switches          #    0,002 K/sec                    ( +-  3,82% )
>                  0      cpu-migrations            #    0,000 K/sec                  
>            128 076      page-faults               #    0,038 M/sec                    ( +-  0,00% )
>     13 044 840 323      cycles                    #    3,902 GHz                      ( +-  0,12% )
>    <not supported>      stalled-cycles-frontend  
>    <not supported>      stalled-cycles-backend   
>     16 341 506 514      instructions              #    1,25  insns per cycle          ( +-  0,00% )
>      4 042 448 707      branches                  # 1209,211 M/sec                    ( +-  0,00% )
>         26 819 441      branch-misses             #    0,66% of all branches          ( +-  0,09% )
> 
>        3,345286450 seconds time elapsed                                          ( +-  0,12% )
> 
> After the patchset:
> 
> fweisbec@Aivars:~/linux-2.6-tip/tools/perf$ sudo ./perf stat -r 20 ./perf report --stdio -s cpu > /dev/null
> 
>  Performance counter stats for './perf report --stdio -s cpu' (20 runs):
> 
>        3365,739972      task-clock (msec)         #    0,999 CPUs utilized            ( +-  0,12% )
>                  6      context-switches          #    0,002 K/sec                    ( +-  2,99% )
>                  0      cpu-migrations            #    0,000 K/sec                  
>            128 076      page-faults               #    0,038 M/sec                    ( +-  0,00% )
>     13 133 593 870      cycles                    #    3,902 GHz                      ( +-  0,12% )
>    <not supported>      stalled-cycles-frontend  
>    <not supported>      stalled-cycles-backend   
>     16 626 286 378      instructions              #    1,27  insns per cycle          ( +-  0,00% )
>      4 119 555 502      branches                  # 1223,967 M/sec                    ( +-  0,00% )
>         28 687 283      branch-misses             #    0,70% of all branches          ( +-  0,09% )
> 
>        3,367984867 seconds time elapsed                                          ( +-  0,12% )
> 
> 
> Which makes about 0.6% difference on the overhead.
> Now it had less overhead in common cases (default sorting, -s sym, -G, etc...).
> I guess it's not really worrysome, it's mostly unvisible at this scale.