HP Caliper User's Guide

This was run on an HP-UX 11i V2 September 2004 OE system. Reports run on other
systems look similar, except that the specific advice given is unique to the application
and the system.
How to Read an Advisor Report
Each Advisor run analyzes one or more application objects. (Currently, only executable
objects can be analyzed.) A separate report is output for each object analyzed. The
reports are in alphabetic name order.
See “HP Caliper Advisor Report, with Annotations” (p. 108) for an example report.
The description section of the report precedes the advice section. The description section
is important because the given set of databases might contain several different
executables, different versions of the same executable, and performance data from the
same or different types of systems. The Advisor reports specifically which version, of
which executable, and measured on which system that the advice applies to. In general,
the Advisor selects the most recent version of each executable it finds in the database(s)
and only uses consistent performance data for each analyzed object.
There are three elements to a piece of advice:
• Index
The index value represents the approximate importance of a particular piece of
advice. The values typically range from 0.0 to 100.0. The index value does not
indicate the improvement that could be achieved if the improvement suggestion
is followed. It is a rough means of ordering the relevance of various unrelated
performance issues. You can use the Advisor --advice-cutoff command-line
option to specify what the minimum index value should be.
• Class
All advice is classified as to what area of application performance it applies to.
Every piece of advice belongs to an advice class, which is one of the following:
— General: advice that doesn’t fit into a single category or can’t easily be classified
— CPU: items pertaining to non-memory CPU cycles
— Memory: for memory-related performance issues
— IO: for any I/O advice
— System: advice relating to system calls, system resources, process management,
and so forth
You can use the Advisor --advice-classes command-line option to specify
which classes of advice should be included in the report.
• Analysis
This is where the performance advice is printed.
An example is shown below.
How to Read an Advisor Report 109