• Created by Unknown User (akbar), last modified on Feb 16, 2007

A useful code profiling tool is the dprofpp tool which gives detailed information on the various functions and their relative performance. The tool needs to be provided the input of a code profile file. This file can be generated by the Devel::DProf module in conjunction with the perl debugger. The Devel::DProf  can be downloaded from CPAN using the command 

   perl -MCPAN -e 'install Devel::DProf'

After installing the module, you can profile the execution of flowscan by running the perl debugger as:

    perl -d:DProf flowscan

 This generates a tmon.out file which contains the code profiling information. Once the execution is complete you can examine a summary of the performance of the subroutines and overall code by:

    dprofpp -F tmon.out

 In my case this produced the following output for the execution of flowscan for about 50 flow files. Meanings of various columns are given at dprofpp:

 akbar@iepm-resp $ dprofpp -F tmon.out
Faking 6 exit timestamp(s).
Total Elapsed Time = -2.14996 Seconds
  User+System Time =        0 Seconds
Exclusive Times
%Time ExclSec CumulS #Calls sec/call Csec/c  Name
 0.00   3.050  3.034  10560   0.0003 0.0003  HTML::Table::getTable
 0.00   2.990  2.956  22906   0.0001 0.0001  RRDs::update
 0.00   1.730  1.730     18   0.0961 0.0961  JKFlow::pushApplications
 0.00   1.523  6.549   1761   0.0009 0.0037  JKFlow::scoreboard
 0.00   1.000  5.145  22906   0.0000 0.0002  JKFlow::reporttorrd
 0.00   0.780  1.178  61390   0.0000 0.0000  JKFlow::countDirections
 0.00   0.750  0.749    468   0.0016 0.0016  RRDs::create
 0.00   0.720  0.716  32383   0.0000 0.0000  JKFlow::scale
 0.00   0.620  1.826  61390   0.0000 0.0000  main::wanted
 0.00   0.570  3.458  22906   0.0000 0.0002  JKFlow::updateRRD
 0.00   0.568 12.226    881   0.0006 0.0139  JKFlow::reporttorrdfiles
 0.00   0.540  0.356 122780   0.0000 0.0000  Net::Patricia::match_integer
 0.00   0.460  0.436  15958   0.0000 0.0000  HTML::Table::addRow
 0.00   0.460  1.454  61390   0.0000 0.0000  JKFlow::wanted
 0.00   0.345  2.142     49   0.0070 0.0437  Cflow::find

 It is apparent from the above report that the HTML::Table package is taking up a bulk of the execution time. HTML::Table::getTable takes 3.050 secs of exclusive execution time and 3.034 secs of cumulative execution time (including the subroutines called from within). Clearly this is on of the performance bottlenecks which needs to be removed. HTML::Table is mostly used in the scoreboarding functions of JKFlow which is done for every direction and every few flowfiles. I am currently working on filtering out the scoreboarding code of the JKFlow and making it available via a datastructure so that the user has more control over the scoreboarding capabilities and unnecessary use of the HTML::Table can be removed.

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