Intel® VTune™ Profiler Performance Analysis Cookbook

Cookbook

  • 2021
  • 11/09/2021
  • Public Content
Contents

Profiling Applications in Amazon Web Services* (AWS) EC2 Instances

This recipe helps you set up a VM instance in AWS for performance profiling with
Intel® VTune™
Profiler
.

Ingredients

This section lists the hardware and software tools used for the performance analysis scenario.
  • Application:
    matrix
    . The application is used as a demo and not available for download.
  • Tools
    :
    Intel® VTune™
    Profiler
     2020 - Hotspots analysis
    • Starting with the 2020 release, Intel® VTune™ Amplifier has been renamed to
      Intel® VTune™
      Profiler
      .
    • Most recipes in the
      Intel® VTune™
      Profiler
       Performance Analysis Cookbook are flexible. You can apply them to different versions of
      Intel® VTune™
      Profiler
      . In some cases, minor adjustments may be required.
    • Get the latest version of
      Intel® VTune™
      Profiler
      :

Create and Configure a Virtual Machine Instance

  1. On the Amazon Web Services site, click
    Sign In to the Console
     to log in to your account.
    If you do not have an account, create it.
  2. Enter the Amazon EC2 Dashboard, select
    Compute > EC2
    .
  3. Click
    Launch Instance
     to create and configure your virtual machine with a wizard.
    In the configuration wizard, you can specify an OS and specification of the instance that fits your case (number of CPUs, memory, storage, and networking capacity).
  4. In
    Step 1: Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
    , select Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTSlick.
  5. In
    Step 2: Choose an Instance Type
    , select an instance and click
    Next: Configure Instance Details
    .
    Recommended system requirements for the
    VTune
    Profiler
     is 4 GB of RAM and at least 10Gb free disk space.
  6. In
    Step 3: Configure Instance Details
    , enable
    Auto-assign Public IP
     and click
    Next: Add Storage
    .
  7. In
    Step 4: Add Storage
    , increase the size of the storage device and click
    Next: Add Tags
    .
  8. [Optional] In
    Step 5: Add Tags
    , add a tag (for example,
    VTune Demo
    ), then click
    Review and Launch
    .
  9. In
    Step 7: Review Instance Launch
    , click
    Launch
    .
  10. Create a key pair:
    1. Select
      Create a new key pair
       and assign a name (for example, MyEC2Instance).
    2. Click
      Download Key Pair
       to download the key.
    3. Select
      Launch Instances
       to complete the setup.
      The instance is launched.
  11. Click
    View Instances
    .
    When the
    Instance State
     is updated to
    running
    , proceed to the next step.

Connect to the EC 2 Instance

Select the EC2 instance you created and click the
Connect
 tab to connect to your instance via SSH.
PuTTY* does not natively support the private key format (
.pem
) generated by Amazon EC2. You should convert your private key (
.pem
) to the required PuTTY format (
.ppk
) using PuTTYgen before attempting to connect to your instance using PuTTY:
  1. Convert your private key:
    1. Start PuTTYgen.
    2. For the
      Type of key to generate
      , select
      SSH-1 (RSA)
      .
    3. Click
      Load
       and select your
      .pem
       file.
    4. Click
      Save private key
       to save the key in the format that PuTTY can use.
  2. Start PuTTY and specify a Public DNS for the instance and your private key (
    .ppk
    ) file in the
    Connection > SSH > Auth
     pane.
  3. Save this configuration and click
    Open
    .
    You are logged in to the instance.
You need to install the Xubuntu* desktop on your running instance and setup a VNC* Server if you want to access the system via VNC.

Configure the Instance for Profiling

Prepare the target instance for profiling by setting
/proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope
 to 0:
echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope

Run Hotspots Analysis

Run the Hotspots analysis using any of the following methods:
Run a remote collection from the locally installed
VTune
Profiler
 using SSH:
Remote hardware event-based sampling analysis is not available in the AWS EC2 virtualized environment with an exception for the EC2 bare metal instances (i3.metal instance family) that allow direct access to bare metal infrastructure and full profiling capability of the
VTune
Profiler
.
  1. Create a project in the
    VTune
    Profiler
    .
    The
    Configure Analysis
     window opens.
  2. In the
    WHERE
     pane, select
    Remote Linux (SSH)
     and enter
    ubuntu@<
    name of putty configuration
    >
     for the
    SSH destination
    .
    At this point,
    VTune
    Profiler
     attempts to connect to the remote system and install the binaries necessary for collection to the specified folder.
  3. In the
    WHAT
     pane, specify the location of your application and its working directory.
  4. In the
    HOW
     pane, select the
    User-Mode Sampling
    collection mode for the Hotspots analysis (open by default).
  5. Click to start the collection.
    The results are automatically copied to your local system for analysis.
Run
VTune
Profiler
 directly from the AWS instance:
  1. Install the
    VTune
    Profiler
     as described in the Installation Guide.
  2. Run the
    VTune
    Profiler
    . For example:
    sudo <
    vtune_install_dir
    >/vtune_profiler/bin64/vtune-gui
  3. Create a project.
    The
    Configure Analysis
     window opens.
  4. In the
    WHERE
     pane, select
    Local Host
    .
  5. In the
    WHAT
     pane, specify the location of your application and its working directory.
  6. In the
    HOW
     pane, select a preferred collection mode for the Hotspots analysis, for example:
    Hardware Event-Based Sampling
    .
  7. Click to start the collection.
    The analysis result opens in the default Hotspots by CPU Utilization viewpoint.

Product and Performance Information

1

Performance varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more at www.Intel.com/PerformanceIndex.