Tiptop: Hardware Performance Counters

http://tiptop.gforge.inria.fr/

by rrrrtttt • 12 years ago

55 15 12 years ago

tiptop.gforge.inria.fr

mrmondo• 12 years ago

Could someone please explain the differences and advantages of tiptop over using a program like htop for analysing performance for every day operations (if any)?

edwintorok2• 12 years ago

It monitors hardware counters, so it is more similar to 'perf top' than 'htop'/'top', but it can also monitor multiple counters at once. As a disadvantage it can't show the function-level counters, or assembly annotation that 'perf top' can.

So perhaps you could use 'tiptop' to get a general view of what might be slow, and then drill down using 'perf top'.

deathanatos• 12 years ago

I think they're not really in the same class. The article states,

software developers identify critical regions of their applications and evaluate design choices to select the best performing implementation.

Which is what I'd use metrics like cache misses and branch prediction misses for: really fine-tuning some section of the code that needs to execute lightning fast.

htop, on the other hand, gives a more high-level overview. Like, "who's eating all the RAM?". (Or, perhaps more often, "who do I need to kill?")

AYBABTME2• 12 years ago

Once you've identified that a process has a lot of branch mispredict (or other counters), how do you identify where those lots of branch mispredictions are caused?

edwintorok2• 12 years ago

Interesting that this software has reached version 2.2 and it is not available in Debian yet. I filed a RFP: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=754932

thinred• 12 years ago

Preliminary work on the package: http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/tiptop.git I will change to ITP soon. :)

th3iedkid• 12 years ago

it mentions intel instrumentation instructions , does it work on other hardware though goes unmentioned in requirements? Say spark/...

stinos2• 12 years ago

Slightly off-topic (maybe) but can this or another readily available tool be used to track counters during startup/shutdown and provide a log of it which can then be imported in some viewer? (think something like windows Performance Monitor/Event Tracer and the likes)

pgeorgi• 12 years ago

Like http://www.bootchart.org/?

stinos2• 12 years ago

exactly!

oakwhiz• 12 years ago

Is it possible to use these same hardware performance counters to perform a side-channel attack on another process?

Tiptop: Hardware Performance Counters

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