4 HP Caliper Measurement Configuration Files

Each run of HP Caliper uses a particular measurement, which you can specify in the command line. Each measurement corresponds to a particular measurement configuration file supplied by HP Caliper. The measurement configuration files contain variables that control the types of measurements performed and the content of the reports.

You can perform all the HP Caliper measurements without looking at or even knowing about the measurement configuration files, using the default settings in the files.

HP Caliper measurement configuration files are provided with the software kit and reside in the HP Caliper home directory in the config subdirectory. (By default, the home directory is /opt/ caliper/ on HP-UX and /opt/hp-caliper/on Linux.)

You can use these existing measurement configuration files or modify them or even create your own measurement configuration files.

Measurement Configuration Files Provided with HP Caliper

The measurement configuration files provided with HP Caliper and the performance measurements they take are shown below:

•alat

The alat measurement measures and reports sampled advance load address table (ALAT) misses. The ALAT keeps track of speculative (that is, advance) loads. An excessive number of ALAT compares that result in a failed advance load (an ALAT miss) can seriously degrade performance. See “alat Measurement Report Description” (p. 168).

•branch

The branch measurement measures and reports sampled branch mispredictions. See “branch Measurement Report Description” (p. 171).

•cgprof (HP-UX only)

The cgprof measurement measures and reports a call graph profile, produced by instrumenting

the application code. See “cgprof Report Description ” (p. 175).

•cpu (HP-UX only)

The cpu measurement measures and reports per-process metrics based on sampled CPU events.

See “Performing CPU Metrics Analysis ” (p. 151).

•cstack

The cstack measurement measures and reports a sampled call stack profile, produced by periodically sampling the application program counter and each of its thread's call stacks. See “Producing a Sampled Call Stack Profile Analysis” (page 132) and “cstack Measurement Report Description” (page 181).

•cycles (Integrity Servers dual-core Itanium 2 processor and Itanium 9300 quad-core processor only)

The cycles measurement measures and reports a flat profile of the instruction pointers (IPs). See “cycles Measurement Report Description ” (p. 183).

•dcache

The dcache measurement measures and reports sampled data cache metrics. See “dcache Measurement Report Description” (p. 186).

42 HP Caliper Measurement Configuration Files