Every so often you'll see take_deferred_signal() appear in the profile of an application. Sometimes as quite a time consuming function. So, what does it mean?It...
Every so often you'll see take_deferred_signal() appear in the profile of an application. Sometimes as quite a time consuming function. So, what does it mean?It actually comes from signal handling code in libc. If a signal comes in while the application is in a critical section, the signal gets deferred until the critical section is complete. When the application exits the critical section, all the deferred signals get taken. Typically, this function becomes hot due to mutex...
Every so often you'll see take_deferred_signal() appear in the profile of an application. Sometimes as quite a time consuming function. So, what does it mean?It actually comes from signal handling...
I contributed a fair amount of material to a recent white paper about Oracle Solaris Studio. The paper is available for download from the developer...
I contributed a fair amount of material to a recent white paper about Oracle Solaris Studio. The paper is available for download from the developer portal.Optimizing Applications with Oracle Solaris Studio Compilers and ToolsOracle Solaris Studio delivers a fully integrated development platform for generating robust high-performance applications for the latest Oracle Sun systems (SPARC and x86). In order to take full advantage of the latest multicore systems, applications...
I contributed a fair amount of material to a recent white paper about Oracle Solaris Studio. The paper is available for download from the developer portal.Optimizing Applications with Oracle Solaris...
As part of Oracle Develop, I'll be presenting at the Hotel Nikko, in San Francisco on 20th September at 4pm. The session is S317573 titled "Multicore...
As part of Oracle Develop, I'll be presenting at the Hotel Nikko, in San Francisco on 20th September at 4pm. The session is S317573 titled "Multicore Application Programming with Oracle Solaris Studio". The abstract reads as follows:Writing correct and fast parallel applications is often considered a hard problem. However, it doesn't need to be that way. This session will describe how Oracle Solaris Studio can be used to produce applications that are both fast and correct....
As part of Oracle Develop, I'll be presenting at the Hotel Nikko, in San Francisco on 20th September at 4pm. The session is S317573 titled "Multicore Application Programming with Oracle...
It's 2am and I've just handed over the final manuscript for Multicore Application Programming. Those who know publishing will realise that this is not the final...
It's 2am and I've just handed over the final manuscript for Multicore Application Programming. Those who know publishing will realise that this is not the final step. The publishers will layout my text and send it back to me for a final review before it goes to press. It will probably take a few weeks to complete the process.I've also uploaded the final version of the table of contents. I've written the book using OpenOffice.org. It's almost certain not to be a one-to-one...
It's 2am and I've just handed over the final manuscript for Multicore Application Programming. Those who know publishing will realise that this is not the final step. The publishers will layout my...
Professor David Patterson wrote an interesting article in IEEE Spectrum, 'The trouble with multicore'. The tag line is "Chipmakers are busy designing...
Professor David Patterson wrote an interesting article in IEEE Spectrum, 'The trouble with multicore'. The tag line is "Chipmakers are busy designing microprocessors that most programmers can't handle". The thrust of the article is that multicore processors are a hardware development that software is poorly equipped to utilise. There are two main arguments made in the article. The first is that programming languages are very poor at describing parallelism. There has been a...
Professor David Patterson wrote an interesting article in IEEE Spectrum, 'The trouble with multicore'. The tag line is "Chipmakers are busy designing microprocessors that most programmers...
I was pleasantly surprised to find support for runtime analysis embedded in the Solaris Studio IDE. This analysis uses the Performance Analyzer to gather data...
I was pleasantly surprised to find support for runtime analysis embedded in the Solaris Studio IDE. This analysis uses the Performance Analyzer to gather data as the code is running and then presents this data both as timeline views over the runtime of the application, and also source code annotations. Here's the view as the data is gathered.The tool gathers profile data which is shown as an aggregation of time spent in each routine, and also annotated against each line of...
I was pleasantly surprised to find support for runtime analysis embedded in the Solaris Studio IDE. This analysis uses the Performance Analyzer to gather data as the code is running and then presents...
The Performance Analyzer has also had a number of new features and improvements. The most obvious one of these is the new call tree tab. This allows you to...
The Performance Analyzer has also had a number of new features and improvements. The most obvious one of these is the new call tree tab. This allows you to drill down into the call tree for an application and see exactly how the time is divided between the various call stacks.
The Performance Analyzer has also had a number of new features and improvements. The most obvious one of these is the new call tree tab. This allows you to drill down into the call tree for...
In some instances you can get better performance, or reproducibility, by restricting the processors that a thread runs on. Linux has pthread_set_affinity_np...
In some instances you can get better performance, or reproducibility, by restricting the processors that a thread runs on. Linux has pthread_set_affinity_np (the 'np' tag means non-portable). On Solaris you have a number of nearly equivalent options:Processor sets where you create a set of processors and allow only particular processes to run on this set.Processor_bind, where you bind a particular process or thread to a particular virtual CPU. The thread cannot migrate off...
In some instances you can get better performance, or reproducibility, by restricting the processors that a thread runs on. Linux has pthread_set_affinity_np (the 'np' tag means non-portable). On...
The latest Solaris Studio Express release contains the tool discover, which tests for memory access errors. These are errors like reading past the end of an...
The latest Solaris Studio Express release contains the tool discover, which tests for memory access errors. These are errors like reading past the end of an array or freeing a pointer twice. The best part of the tool is that it does not require a special build of the application. The sequence is:$ discover a.out$ a.outThe discover command adds instrumentation to the executable, and you then run the resulting binary in the same way that you would normally run your program. The...
The latest Solaris Studio Express release contains the tool discover, which tests for memory access errors. These are errors like reading past the end of an array or freeing a pointer twice. The best...
