PerfSpect ·

Quick Start | Output | 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 by default, selects the 5 containers using the most CPU at start of perf-collect. To monitor specific containers provide up to 5 comma separated cids i.e. <cid_1>,<cid_2>
• 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

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
./perf-postprocess

Output

perf-collect outputs:

1. perfstat.csv: raw event counts with system metadata

perf-postprocess outputs:

1. metric_out.sys.average.csv: average metrics
2. metric_out.sys.csv: metric values at every 5 second interval
3. metric_out.html: html view of a few select metrics

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.

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.