HP-UX 11i Version 2 Release Notes (October 2003)

General System Administration

HP Caliper

Chapter 4

HP Caliper

HP Caliper is a general-purpose performance analysis tool for applications on

Itanium-based HP-UX systems. HP Caliper allows you to understand the performance of

your program and to identify ways to improve its run-time performance. HP Caliper

works with any Itanium-based binary and does not require your applications to have any

special preparation to enable performance measurement.

The two primary ways to use HP Caliper are as a profile based optimization (PBO) tool

and as a performance analysis tool.

Summary of Change

• Itanium and Itanium 2 chip support

• Full multi-process support with arbitrary process selection and process summary

• Caliper info mode with detailed help on PMU events

• Performance data files for saving and replaying Caliper data

• Ability to attach to a running process for all measurements and detach for PMU

measurements

• Ability to measure specific regions of code for PMU measurements

• Traces of PMU measurements

• Improved ability to print Caliper reports at failure points

• Usability improvements (startup files, better inline & source correlation, cumulative

percentage, improved performance, memory usage & scaling with threads &

processes, bug fixes)

Impact

You can run Caliper 3.0 for HP-UX 11i v2 on Itanium and Itanium 2 machines for all

measurement capabilities. For multi-process applications, you can measure one, all or

any set of arbitrary processes in the process-tree by specifying the processes to selected

in one of many ways (pattern matching, name etc.). You can then get the output for each

process along with a process tree and summary detailing; such reports pertain to which

process and what processes are the top performance bottlenecks. You can also attach to a

running process via pid, specify a duration to stay attached, and then detach for PMU

measurements.

In this release, for instrumenting measurements, you can attach to a running process

and run till the process completes. For PMU measurements, you can demarcate specific

regions to enable and disable the PMU for exact measurements.

Caliper also provides 3 modes of operation: measurement mode (as before); a new report

mode (the measurement mode can simply generate data files and the report mode can

later replay the data); and a new info mode (provides detailed PMU event descriptions).