Question

What free tools could I use to test the performance of C++ code in Linux? Basically I want to identify the bottleneck of the code and improve on the performance. My application mainly involves computational code using the data from the network. So I would like to improve the speed of execution of the code.

Thanks.

Answer 1

For typical performance benchmarking this is what i use.

• gprof/oprofile – for CPU intensive profiling of your code.
• netstat/ethereal – for network statistics
• iostat/sar – for I/O
• vmstat – for memory
• mpstat/sar – for cpu usage

Now u can isolate the problems based on the output of these tools.

For eg:- if I/O is constant and within limits u can eliminate I/O as a problem.
If CPU usage is heavy as shown my mpstat then get into profiling using gprof/oprofile.

Without the use of all of them together for different runs, its difficult to identify the bottleneck.

Note: U can write a script to run all of them together and store the results in designated folders for each run.