Q&A: Monitoring FSB Activity

Intel_Software_Netw1 — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 01:49:39 GMT

The following is a question received by Intel Software Network Support, followed by the response from the authors of the article.

Q. I read Sergey Zheltov and Stanislav Bratanov's article entitledMeasuring Performance on HT-Enabled Multi-Core: Advantages of a Thread-Oriented Approach. What is the best way of monitoring FSB activity (through software, e.g. taskmgr)? Is there a free app?

A. Here is a list of publicly availabletools that may be used for FSB activity investigation:

(free) PerfMonitor good tool which shows in realtime some selected performance counters (FSB activity also)
(free) Perfmon2
Intel VTune Performance Analyzer

Additionally:

Microsoft Visual Studio* 2005 this tool has an integrated performance analyzer. It hasnt got exact FSB activity counters (like FSB utilization), but has enough performance counters to analyze memory problems in an application.
(free) Microsoft Perfmon* this is a Windows* integrated tool. It has many parameters which can be used to understand a problem. Users also may extend it with new counters (please see the Windows* SDK for details).
(free) For memory subsystem investigation, we would also recommend RightMark Memory Analyzer* tool.

One may also consider using the TraceLog tool available in the Windows* XP/2003 DDK. The tool may help detect memory paging problems and also correlate the collected data with thread activity.

Lexi S.

IntelSoftware NetworkSupport

http://www.intel.com/software

Re: Q&A: Monitoring FSB Activity

Intel_Software_Netw1 — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 01:51:56 GMT

Another of our engineers adds:

Using performance monitoring events is likely to be the least invasive method to characterize FSB activities associated with the interaction between a workload and the platform hardware. The key to using any of the performance monitoring tools is to use the proper performance monitoring events to study various key aspects of FSB activities. There are specific events that are useful to study FSB latency, throughput. Usually, more in-depth analysis are necessary to gain insights on various factors that influence average FSB latency/throughtput. Appendix B of the Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Optimization Manual can help you narrow down the performance events to analyze FSB activities.

Lexi S.

IntelSoftware NetworkSupport

http://www.intel.com/software

topic Q&A: Monitoring FSB Activity in Intel® Moderncode for Parallel Architectures

Q&A: Monitoring FSB Activity

Re: Q&A: Monitoring FSB Activity