Perf Event Overhead Measurements

Perf Event Overhead Measurements


perf_event / perctr / perfmon2 comparison

As a PAPI developer I am interested in the overhead caused by using performance counters while self-monitoring code.

The following shows the results of some regression tests run across a wide range of Linux kernels.

We are still concerned that overhead is still so much worse than the perfctr and perfmon2 implementations that have become deprecated since perf_event was introduced in 2.6.31.

Overhead Results

The following shows the overhead of a start/read/stop operation, with nothing in between.

As can be seen, the perf_event behavior varies with kernel version but stays relatively consistent. perfmon2 and perfctr overhead is much lower.

The results also show kernel 3.4 using the new "rdpmc" read counter without entering kernel support (this is how perfctr gets such low-latency reads). Oddly on perf_event this often makes the latency *worse* not better.

For more details on methodology and a closer look at the perf_event results skip to the next section on this page.

CPUTotal OverheadStart OverheadStop OverheadRead Overhead
Core2
Nehalem
AMD 0fh

Variation as More Counters are Added

The above results are just for measuring one counter. The below results show how things increase as more counters are added. In general they should increase linearly as additional rdmsr/rdpmc instructions are needed for each additional counter.
Core2:


AMD family 0fh:


Context Switch

Context switch time with and without a perf counter measurement running. This was gathered using the lmbench lat_ctx benchmark. I'm not sure why the time reported varied so drastically from 2.6.30 through 2.6.33.

Methodology

These results are with the CPU scaling governors set to "performance", the test bound to CPU0, the NMI watchdog disabled, and the test run 1000 times.

All of the kernels are stock kernels, built with gcc-4.4, using the following config: CONFIG-STOCK

The code for all of the tests can be found here: perfevent_overhead-0.14.tar.bz2 (8 August 2012)

The code creates the events in advance, and then measures the TSC around the start, stop and read calls. Something like:
   start_before=rdtsc();
   ret1=ioctl(fd[0], PERF_EVENT_IOC_ENABLE,0);
   start_after=rdtsc();

The machines involved:
Back to perf_events benchark page