User Guide

Intel® VTune™ Profiler User Guide

ID 766319
Date 12/16/2022
Public

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Document Table of Contents

Temporary Directory for Performance Results on Linux* Targets

Configure a temporary directory for the remote or local data collection on Linux target systems.

When performing a hardware event-based sampling collection with the Intel® VTune™ Profiler or configuring the result directory for analysis on a mounted share, temporary data files are written to the system global temporary directory. Typically the global temporary directory is /tmp.

Depending on the length of the VTune Profiler analysis and data collected, significant temporary disk space may be required. The temporary data may exceed the current allocated or available global temporary storage space. If the system global temporary space is exceeded, the VTune Profiler analysis may fail with a warning similar to the following: Warning: Cannot load data file `/home/user/r001hs/data.0/tbs0123456789.tb6' (tbrw call…..) failed: Invalid sample file (24). Note that the VTune Profiler temporary files may no longer be in the temporary storage location, giving you the false impression that there is plenty of space available. In this case, you may wish to check the temporary storage usage while the analysis is running. If the usage of system temporary storage reaches 100%, this may be the root cause of the error.

If the cause of the error is insufficient temporary disk space, you may set up an alternative temporary directory for collected data. VTune Profiler may still keep writing some scratch files of insignificant size (for example, the socket file sep_ipc_socket_0) to the system global temporary directory. However, it will utilize the defined alternative temporary location for the larger files such as those beginning with lwp (for example, lwp28478__wallclock.tb7, lwp28478_user.mrk, lwp28478_7.txt). When the VTune Profiler completes finalization, all temporary scratch files are automatically removed.

Configuring an Alternative Temporary Directory for Local Targets

For local targets, you may set the standard Linux TMPDIR environment variable to an alternate directory path with the sufficient temporary storage space. To configure the TMPDIR environment variable, do the following:

  1. From within the shell where you will be running the VTune Profiler command line or GUI, assign a value and export TMPDIR, for example:

    > export TMPDIR=/directory_path/ tmp

  2. Verify the assignment:

    > echo $TMPDIR
  3. Verify directory permissions are sufficient for the directory assigned to TMPDIR:

    > ls -ld /directory_path/ tmp
  4. From the shell window, run the VTune Profiler hardware event-based sampling collection using either the command line or GUI.

Configuring an Alternative Temporary Directory for Remote Targets

To change the temporary directory for remote targets from GUI, do the following:

  1. Click the Configure Analysis button.

  2. Select the remote Linux (SSH) target system.

  3. In the Temporary directory on the remote system field specify your alternative temporary directory.

To specify an alternative temporary directory from the command line, use the target-tmp-dir option, for example:

host>./vtune --target-system=ssh:vtune@10.125.21.170 -target-tmp-dir=/home/tmp –collect hotspots -knob sampling-mode=hw -knob enable-stack-collection=true -- /home/samples/matrix