Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:03:20 +0200 | From | Ingo Molnar <> | Subject | Re: [patch 0/8] Introducing the "timechart" tool |
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* Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org> wrote:
> [note: since this is a visualization tool, and lkml doesn't like > html email, it's probably better to read the online version at > > http://blog.fenrus.org/?p=5 > > in which I also show screenshots of the tool. The following text > is the first part of the online introduction] > > Finding out why your Linux computer performs the way it does has > been a hard task. Sure, there is Oprofile, and even ???perf??? in > recent kernels. There is LatencyTOP to find out where latencies > happen. > > But all of these tools are rather limited when the software stack > that has the performance issue is more complex than a single > program. The tool that comes closest to being useful is > `bootchart???, but that has a rather limited resolution. > > To solve this, I have been working on a new tool, called > Timechart, that has the objective to show on a system level what > is going on, at various levels of detail. In fact. one of the > design ideas behind timechart is that the output should be > ???infinitely zoomable???; that is, if you want to know more > details about something, you should be able to zoom in to get > these details. The rest of this blog post describes some aspects > of timechart, using real life examples and screenshots. However, > it is really hard to show the power of timechart on such a static > page, to get a real feeling of what timechart can show you really > ought to try it out yourself.....
Nice! 'perf timechart' is IMO a really intuitive way to visualize perf record output.
Text output goes only so far - patterns of scheduling (and patterns of bad behavior) are a lot easier to notice in SVGs.
Ingo
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