> when i was running a large production Unix shop on Solaris, my job
> depended on having this kind of performance monitoring. we also
> developed a Perl/web-based analysis tool that grabbed sar data on a
> regular basis, graphed it, then compressed it and archived it. that
> kind of stuff is great to show off to management, as well as being
> actually useful ;)
Definately.
> > Are you referring to measuring CPU performance
> > (cache misses, TLB refills and so on) or something else? My MSR patch
> > includes a thin driver for performance monitoring:
> > http://www.atnf.csiro.au/~rgooch/linux/
> >
> > and is supported by a userspace library to yield easy access. The idea
> > is that you can then build glitzy tools on top of the library.
>
> i have your patch... it's very cool. i'd like some form of Intel MSR
> support to be included in the stock kernel.
Yep. I figure on submitting it to Linus once 2.3 comes out.
BTW: it's also got support for Cyrix MII. The registers are different
for Pentium, P6 too. I guess that's why they call it "model-specific".
> however, it's probably not useful for someone who's trying to tune
> their web server, for example, since it focuses on very specific
> parts of the performance picture. sar and vm/iostat can provide a
> good overall picture of a system's performance, and sar can maintain
> performance history, which is valuable when suddenly things stop
> working "the way they did yesterday."
Agreed. I think we need all these different measuring facilities.
> and besides, what about the alpha and sparc owners out there? :)
When I get time and/or patches, I'll roll in support for these as
well. The interface I've developed is quite generic. There's a not
insignificant chance that MIPS support will come soonish because I
suspect my next job will lumber me with an SGI.
Regards,
Richard....
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