AMD's CodeAnalyst

Now that I have stabilized the features of ZeroBUGS, I am looking into improving the overall performance and implicitly the user experience.

This weekend I live searched for profiling tools and I found AMD's CodeAnalyst.

On Linux, Code Analyst uses oprofile.

I downloaded the source code for version 2.6.22 of CodeAnalyst and proceeded to build it on a Fedora 5, 64-bit system equipped with an Athlon processor. It is not clear to me whether the 2.6.22 version is a coincidence. Has the kernel version to be an exact match for best results?

I am running 2.6.20 on that box, and the program ran but collected no samples, as per this message

Oprofile engine has encounter error genrating system view

I grepped for the message and found it here:

void opdata_handler091::read_op_module_data()
{
    string session =  m_session;
    vector <string> non_options;

    reset_data();

    for (size_t i = 0; i < m_op_events.size (); i++) {
        non_options.clear ();
        non_options.insert (non_options.begin (), m_op_events[i]);
        non_options.insert (non_options.begin (), session.data ());

        try {
            generate_apps_summary(non_options, i);
        } catch (op_fatal_error const & e) {
            string msg =
                "Oprofile engine has encounter error genrating system view:\n\n";
            msg += e.what();
            m_ca_display->update_display(msg.c_str());
            reset_data();
            break;
        }
    }
}

(File /src/ca/libs/libopdata/op091/opdata_handler091.cpp). The reason I am showing the code snippet here (broken English not withstanding) is that I noticed a bad coding idiom: the catch block is doing quite a lot of stuff, and I see several things that could possibly throw.

Nit-picking aside, I rebooted the machine in a different configuration (Ubuntu 6.06, 32-bit, running kernel 2.6.15) and this time I got luckier. I even found a few interesting bottlenecks in ZeroBUGS.

I concluded that the oprofiled / 2.6.20 64-bit kernel combination must be the culprit of my initial lack of success.

It definitely looks like CodeAnalyst is a useful tool, once one gets past the initial small road blocks.