Rational Performance Advisor - IBM Power7 Optimization And Tuning Manual

Rational Performance Advisor

IBM Rational Developer for Power Systems Software IDE V8.5 introduces a new component
that is called Performance Advisor, which provides a rich set of features for performance
tuning C and C++ applications on IBM AIX and IBM PowerLinux systems. Although not
directly related to the tooling described in "Expert system advisors" on page 156, Rational
Performance Advisor has the same goal of helping users to best use Power hardware with
tooling that offers simple collection, management, and analysis of performance data.
Performance Advisor gathers data from several sources. The raw application performance
data comes from the same expert-level tprof and OProfile CPU profilers described in "AIX"
on page 162 and "Linux" on page 171, and other low-level operating system tools. The debug
information that is generated by the compiler allows this data to be matched back to the
original source code. XLC compilers can generate XML report files that provide information
about optimizations that were performed during compilation. Finally, the application build and
runtime systems are analyzed to determine whether there are any potential
environmental problems.
All of this data is automatically gathered, correlated, analyzed, and presented in a way that is
quick to access and easy to understand (Figure B-5).
Figure B-5 Rational Performance Advisor
Key features include:
Performance Explorer organizes your performance tuning sessions and data.
System Scorecard reports on your Power build and runtime environments.
Hotspots Browser shows CPU profiling results for your application and its functions.
Hotspots Comparison Browser compares runs for regression analysis or fix verification.
The Performance Source Viewer and Outline view gives precise line-level profiling results.
Invocations Browser displays dynamic call information from your application
The Recommendations view offers expert-system guidance.
Appendix B. Performance tooling and empirical performance analysis
161