Solaris Application Programming, 1/e - Chapter 4 - Parent Directory

74 Chapter 4 Informational Tools
When the -c flag is passed to cpustat (and cputrack) it provides a pair of
counters on which to collect. These are referred to as pic0 and pic1. More than 60
event types are available to select from on the UltraSPARC IIICu processor, and
two can be selected at once. Some of the event types are available on only one of
the counters, so not every pairing is possible. The ,sys appended at the end of the
pair of counter descriptions indicates that the counters should also be collected
during system time. The counters are collected in rotation, so each pair of counters
is collected for a short period of time. The default interval is five seconds.
If the program is not in a steady state—suppose it reads some data from memory
and then spends the next few seconds in intensive floating-point operations—it
is quite possible that the coarse sampling used earlier will miss the interesting
points (e.g., looking for cache misses during the floating-point-intensive code, and
looking for floating-point operations when the data is being fetched from memory).
Example 4.32 shows the command line for cputrack to rotate through a selection
of performance counters, and partial output from the command.
Example 4.32 Example of cpustat Output
$ cpustat -c pic0=Rstall_storeQ,pic1=Re_DC_miss,sys \
> -c pic0=EC_rd_miss,pic1=Re_EC_miss,sys \
> -c pic0=Rstall_IU_use,pic1=Rstall_FP_use,sys \
> -c pic0=Cycle_cnt,pic1=Re_PC_miss,sys \
> -c pic0=Instr_cnt,pic1=DTLB_miss,sys \
> -c pic0=Cycle_cnt,pic1=Re_RAW_miss,sys
time cpu event pic0 pic1
5.005 0 tick 294199 1036736 # pic0=Rstall_storeQ,pic1=Re_DC_miss,sys
5.005 1 tick 163596 12604317 # pic0=Rstall_storeQ,pic1=Re_DC_miss,sys
10.005 0 tick 5485 965974 # pic0=EC_rd_miss,pic1=Re_EC_miss,sys
10.005 1 tick 76669 11598139 # pic0=EC_rd_miss,pic1=Re_EC_miss,sys
...
The columns of cpustat output shown in Example 4.32 are as follows.
The first column reports the time of the sample. In this example, the samples
are being taken every five seconds.
The next column lists the CPU identifier. The samples are taken and reported
for each CPU.
The next column lists the type of event. For cpustat, the type of event is
only going to be a tick.
The next two columns list the counts for performance counters pic0 and
pic1 since the last tick event.
Finally, if cpustat is rotating through counters, the names of the counters
are reported after the # sign.