microperf

microperf is a perf wrapper. The basic idea is that it converts a perf.data file by inserting all samples into a database, making it then easier to query for specific patterns or code smells.

Usage

Generating a profile

First, note that your executable should be compiled with debug symbols (-g, -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo, ...).

Since microperf is simply a wrapper, generating a profile can be done directly with perf.

perf record -F99 --call-graph=dwarf -- <COMMAND>

Alternatively, microperf perf provides a convenience passthrough to perf. This can be useful when a different perf executable should be used (see MICROPERF_PERF_EXE option below).

Running the Patterns analyzer

I've written a couple queries to identify common bad patterns. At time of this writing, this includes cycles spent in:

1. tree-based structures (std::map, std::set): these can often be replaced with hash-based data structures.
2. constructors: these are often signs of excessive copying.

Options

The environment variable MICROPERF_PERF_EXE can be set to the path of a perf executable to be used instead of the default perf command.