Intel® VTune™ Profiler Performance Analysis Cookbook

Cookbook

  • 2022
  • 03/22/2022
  • Public Content
Contents

Instruction Cache Misses

This recipe explores profiling a front-end-bound application using the General Exploration analysis of the Intel® VTune™ Amplifier and using a PGO option to reduce ICache misses.
Content expert
: Dmitry Ryabtsev
General Exploration analysis was renamed to Microarchitecture Exploration analysis staring with Intel VTune Amplifier 2019.

Ingredients

This section lists the hardware and software tools used for the performance analysis scenario.
  • Application
    : a test sample based on
    sqlite
     database. The application is used as a demo and not available for download.
  • Tools
    :
    • Intel VTune Amplifier 2018: General Exploration 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
        :
    • Intel® C++ Compiler
  • Operating system
    : Microsoft* Windows* 7
  • CPU
    : Intel® microarchitecture code named Skylake

Run General Exploration Analysis

To have a high-level understanding of potential performance bottlenecks for the sample, start with the General Exploration analysis provided by the VTune Amplifier:
  1. Click the
    New Project
     button on the toolbar and specify a name for the new project, for example:
    sqlite
    .
  2. In the
    Analysis Target
    window, select the
    local host
     target system type for the host-based analysis.
  3. Select the
    Launch Application
     target type and specify an application for analysis on the right.
  4. Click the
    Choose Analysis
     button on the right, select
    Microarchitecture Analysis > General Exploration
     and click
    Start
    .
    VTune Amplifier launches the application, collects data, finalizes the data collection result resolving symbol information, which is required for successful source analysis.

Identify Hardware Hotspots

General Exploration analysis helps you see dominant performance bottlenecks in your code. Start your analysis with the Summary view that displays application-level statistics per hardware metrics. Focus on the flagged performance issues:
The sample application is front-end bound (29.3% of Pipeline Slots) with the instruction cache misses as a dominant bottleneck (7.1% of Clockticks).
Switch to the
Bottom-up
 tab to locate the issue in the code. Click the
Customize Grouping
 button next to the
Grouping
 toolbar and create a new custom grouping
Module/Source File
:
The new grouping applied to the collected results shows that
sqlite3.c
 file is the main hotspot taking the most of CPU cycles to execute:
Navigating to the ICache Misses metric also discovers the highest value for the
sqlite3.c
 file:

Re-compile Your Code with PGO

Use Intel® C++ Compiler to apply the Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) to the
sqlite
 library:
  1. Recompile your code with the
    /Qprof-gen
     option.
  2. Run the benchmark.
  3. Re-compile the code with the
    /Qprof-use
     option.
For more details, see the Profile-Guided Optimizations Overview.

Verify Optimization

Re-run the General Exploration analysis on the optimized code. The new result shows 30.3 seconds of Elapsed time, which is an almost 4% improvement to the original 31.5 seconds:
The number of clockticks stalled due to ICache Misses for the
sqlite
 library has reduced to 6.4% from 9.3%:

Product and Performance Information

1

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