Hi,

thanks for the quick response.

I think MEM_LOAD_RETIRED:L2_MISS is a precise event, so I also collected program counter and register values amongst others with the PTU tool. The graphical interface of the tool summarizes and interprets the samples that have been collected, and doesn't give me access to the collected data itself (which I would like to process and interpret myself). That is why I tried using the command-line utilitities to get more data. The vtsarun tool itself stores the precise data of the samples in a file *pebs, but that is in Intel proprietary format. I assumed that the visualization tools (vtsaview, vtdpview) transform this data into a more open format (sqlite), where the full data is available. But this doesn't seem to be true, Could I get access to the raw samples that the tools have gathered? I assumed that the 'EventSamples' table in the database would contain this data, but no matter how I try to convert the raw data, the table stays empty.

Thanks for your help.

Regards,

Zoltan

Hi Julia,

thanks for the explanation.

Having raw samples would be indeed nice. I'll check the updates of the tool.

What I would also consider very interesting is the distribution of memory accesses in time. I understand this as follows: given a specific moment during the runtime of the application, what address(es) or blocks of memory were accessed by which threads. Do you consider to incorporate something like this into future version of PTU?

Best regards,

Zoltan

Hi Julia,

well, one could try different sample-after values to get a more complete picture of the memory behavior of the program. And I assume that hardware performance profiling could be still much less intrusive than an instrumentation-based scheme.

Thanks for your recommendation regarding PIN. I briefly looked at it, but I was not sure whether it works also for multithreaded programs without much trouble. I'll take another look then.

Best regards,

Zoltan