[llvm-dev] A couple metrics of LLD/ELF's performance

[Rui Ueyama via llvm-dev]

On Sun, Nov 27, 2016 at 3:23 AM, Sean Silva <chisophugis at gmail.com> wrote:

> These numbers were collected on Rafael's clang-fsds test case (however, I
> removed -O3 and --gc-sections) with a command like:
> ```
> sudo perf record --event=cache-misses --call-graph=dwarf --
> /home/sean/pg/llvm/release/bin/ld.lld @response.txt -o /tmp/t --no-threads
> ```
>
> And then
> ```
> sudo perf report --no-children --sort dso,srcfile
> ```
>
> One annoying thing about these numbers from perf is that they don't sum to
> 100% usually; so just treat the numbers as relative to each other. Overall
> I'm not very happy with perf. I don't fully trust its output.
> Also, keep in mind that clang-fsds doesn't have debug info, so the heavy
> string handling costs don't show up in this profile.
>
>
>
> --event=cycles
> This is the perf default and correlates with overall runtime. One
> interesting thing this shows is that LLD is currently quite bottlenecked on
> the kernel.
> https://reviews.llvm.org/P7944
>
> These other metrics are harder to improve. Improving these metrics will
> require macro-scale optimizations to our data structures and IO. This means
> that we should be aware of them so that we avoid going into a local minimum
> of performance.
>
> --event=cache-misses
> I believe these are L2 misses. getOffset shows up here quite a bit.
> One useful purpose for this metric is that since L2 is core-private (my
> CPU is an i7-6700HQ, but this will apply to all recent big intel cores), it
> won't contend with other cores for the L3 cache. So misses here are where
> cores start to feel each other's presence.
> https://reviews.llvm.org/P7943
>
> --event=LLC-load-misses
> These are misses in last level cache (LLC). I.e. times that we have to go
> to DRAM (SLOOOW).
> The getVA codepath show up strongly and we see the memcpy into the output.
> We may want to consider a nontemporal memcpy to at least avoid polluting
> the cache.
> These misses contend on the DRAM bus (although currently it may be
> underutilized and so adding more parallelism will help to keep it busy, but
> only up to a point).
> https://reviews.llvm.org/P7947
>

Will nontemporal memcpy make any difference? After we memcpy an input
section to an output section, we apply relocation to the output section. So
we write to the same memory region twice.

Is there any easy way to experiment that? I guess writing a well-optimized
nontemporal memcpy for an experiment is not an easy task, so I wonder if
there's already any code for that.

--event=dTLB-load-misses
> These are dTLB misses for loads (on my machine, it corresponds to any time
> that the hardware page table walker kicks in: https://github.com/torvalds/
> linux/blob/f92b7604149a55cb601fc0b52911b1e11f0f2514/arch/x86/events/
> intel/core.c#L434).
> Here we also see the getVA codepath (which is basically doing a random
> lookup into a huge hash table, so it will DTLB miss) and the memcpy into
> the output.
> https://reviews.llvm.org/P7945
>
> --event=minor-faults
> This metric essentially shows where new pages of memory are touched and
> have to be either allocated by the kernel or it has to do a page table
> fixup.
> Here we see the memcpy into the output is a huge part. Also obviously lots
> of minor faults as malloc allocates memory from the kernel.
> https://reviews.llvm.org/P7946
>
>
> -- Sean Silva
>
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