PerfSpect ·

Quick Start | Requirements | Build from source | Caveats | How to contribute

PerfSpect is a system performance characterization tool built on top of linux perf. It contains two parts

perf-collect: Collects harware events

• Collection mode:
  • sudo ./perf-collect default system wide
  • sudo ./perf-collect --socket
  • sudo ./perf-collect --thread
  • sudo ./perf-collect --pid <process-id>
  • sudo ./perf-collect --cid <container-id1>;<container-id2>
• Duration:
  • sudo ./perf-collect default run until terminated
  • sudo ./perf-collect --timeout 10 run for 10 seconds
  • sudo ./perf-collect --app "myapp.sh myparameter" runs for duration of another process

perf-postprocess: Calculates high level metrics from hardware events

• perf-postprocess -r results/perfstat.csv

Quick start (requires perf installed)

wget -qO- https://github.com/intel/PerfSpect/releases/latest/download/perfspect.tgz | tar xvz
cd perfspect
sudo ./perf-collect --timeout 10
sudo ./perf-postprocess -r results/perfstat.csv --html perfstat.html

Deploy in Kubernetes

Modify the template deamonset.yml to deploy in kubernetes

Requirements

Packages:

• perf - PerfSpect uses the Linux perf tool to collect PMU counters

Minimum supported kernels

Xeon Generation	centos 7+	ubuntu 16.04+
Broadwell	3.10	4.15
Skylake	3.10	4.15
Cascadelake	3.10	4.15
Icelake	3.10	4.15
Sapphire Rapids	5.12	5.12

Supported Operating Systems:

• Ubuntu 16.04 and newer
• centos 7 and newer
• Amazon Linux 2
• RHEL 9
• Debian 11

Note: PerfSpect may work on other Linux distributions, but has not been thoroughly tested

Build from source

Requires recent python. On successful build, binaries will be created in dist folder

pip3 install -r requirements.txt
make

Caveats

1. The tool can collect only the counters supported by underlying linux perf version.
2. If you run into locale issues - UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 4519: ordinal not in range(128), more than likely the locales needs to be set appropriately. You could also try running post-process step with LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 LANG=C.UTF-8 ./perf-postprocess -r result.csv
3. The html report creation is not yet supported for cid collection.

How to contribute

Create a pull request on github.com/intel/PerfSpect with your patch. Please make sure your patch is building without errors. A maintainer will contact you if there are questions or concerns.