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TPROF(8) System Manager's Manual TPROF(8)

tprof — record tprof profiling samples

tprof op [arguments]

The tprof tool can be used to monitor hardware events (PMCs) during the execution of certain commands.

The tprof utility makes the kernel driver start profiling, executes the specified command, keeps recording samples from the kernel driver until the command finishes, and reports statistics to the standard error.

The tprof pseudo driver and a suitable backend should be loaded beforehand.

The tprof utility accepts the following options. The first argument, op, specifies the action to take. Valid actions are:

list
Display a list of performance counter events available on the system.
monitor -e name:option [-o outfile] command
Monitor the execution of command command. name specifies the name of the event to count; it must be taken from the list of available events. option specifies the source of the event; it must be a combination of u (userland) and k (kernel). The collected samples are written into the file outfile if specified. The default is “tprof.out”.
analyze [-CkLPs] [-p pid] file
Analyze the samples produced by a previous run of tprof, stored in file, and generate a plain text representation of them.
Don't distinguish CPUs. All samples are treated as its CPU number is 0.
Kernel only. Ignore samples for userland code.
Don't distinguish LWPs. All samples are treated as its LWP ID is 0.
Don't distinguish processes. All samples are treated as its PID is 0.
pid
Process only samples for the process with PID pid and ignore the rest.
Per symbol.

The following command profiles the system during 20 seconds and writes the samples into the file myfile.out.

# tprof monitor -e llc-misses:k -o myfile.out sleep 20
The following command displays the results of the sampling.
# tprof analyze myfile.out

The following CPU models are supported:

The tprof utility reports the following statistics about the activities of the tprof pseudo driver.

sample
The number of samples collected and prepared for userland consumption.
overflow
The number of samples dropped because the per-CPU buffer was full.
buf
The number of buffers successfully prepared for userland consumption.
emptybuf
The number of buffers which have been dropped because they were empty.
dropbuf
The number of buffers dropped because the number of buffers kept in the kernel exceeds the limit.
dropbuf_samples
The number of samples dropped because the buffers containing the samples were dropped.

tprof(4)

The tprof utility was written by YAMAMOTO Takashi. It was revamped by Maxime Villard in 2018.

The contents and representation of recorded samples are undocumented and will likely be changed for future releases of NetBSD in an incompatible way.

October 11, 2019 NetBSD-9.2