VTune Amplifier 2019 painfully slow to finalize results in VS2017

[cbell]

My machine is a 3.6GHz Xeon, 6 cores, 128GB ram, masses of disk, running W10.

I have VS 2017 Professional version 15.9.20 with Parallel studio 2019 update 5 installed, although I have updated VTune Amplifier to Update 8.

Profiling works, but "finalizing" a result is painfully slow - typically between 3 and 5 minutes.   It gets there in the end, but compared to previous Parallel studio versions in VS2013 on both this and other machines it is like watching paint dry!

My projects and object files are all on a fast local disk, so it's not that (I've seen Intel's advice not to use an NFS mounted disk for this).   My source code is on a network disk, but I don't think it is that since if I look at network traffic in Task manager during the finalization process it shows absolutely zero network activity.

I've checked this forum and I see that my experience is not unique, however the only other similar post tails off with a "we're looking into it" ... some years ago.

Has anyone come up with a fix since then?

[AthiraM_Intel]

Hi,

Thanks for reaching out to us.

Could you please try the same using VTune 2020 U1

You can try advanced options like fast finalization.Please refer the below link for more information.

https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/documentation/vtune-help/top/analyze-performance/control-data-collection/finalization.html

Also you can try standalone version over VS integration.

Hope this helps. If you face any issue please let us know.

[cbell]

Thanks for the suggestion.  Will that work with Parallel Studio 19 or will I need to download PS 20?

[AthiraM_Intel]

Hi,

You can give a try with your existing installation and if you are facing any issues,please go for an upgrade.

We would always recommend to use the latest versions.

Thanks

[cbell]

Sorry, I'm not brave enough to risk having to update my build environment to 2020 on Visual Studio 2017. 

A Google search suggests others have undergone pain doing this and I too have (many) scars from past battles with Visual Studio.   We know from bitter experience that any Intel / VS combination takes about 1 to 2 years to settle down and be reliable "out of the box" - sorry, not meant to be rude, just truthful.  

[AthiraM_Intel]

Hi,

Are you able to tryout with your existing installations?

Thanks

[cbell]

OK, I have a temporary build environment on a laptop, I suppose I could try that and if it all goes horribly wrong it won't really matter since I don't use that machine for production work.

To be continued...

[AthiraM_Intel]

Hi,

Thanks for the update. Please let us know if you face any issue.

[AthiraM_Intel]

Hi,

Could you please give us an update.

Thanks

[cbell]

Update: working most of last weekend on "work"; will be working all this week on "work".  Not had any time for installing this on 2ndary machine I'm afraid.

Suggest organising a simultaneous outage of MS Teams, MS Outlook and Skype for Business to reduce pester level

Sorry!

[AthiraM_Intel]

Hi,

Thanks for getting back to us. Since you are using older version,it would be difficult for us to triage more about the issue. Please take your own time and do a software upgradation as suggested earlier. We would be happy to hear back from you.

If you have a valid Vtune licence for the current version, you can also reach out to online service center at the below URL for the support.

https://supporttickets.intel.com or https://software.intel.com/en-us/support/priority-support

We would recommend attaching screenshots when raising the issue.

Thanks.

[cbell]

Thanks for your patience with me over this.   I finally had time to install VTune 2020 on a backup machine last weekend and it all worked, so I took a brave pill and installed it on my main build machine this morning...

... it all worked and, best of all, it now processes the results of a profiling session in well under a minute whereas previously it was taking anything up to ten minutes.  

So problem solved, thank you for the suggestion.   For the record this is VS2017 + Intel 19 update 5 compilers + (now) Vtune 2020 update 2.

I'm also interested to see some new features in there to do with GPU performance profiling.   We're very old school and boring as far as GPUs go in that we use them only for OpenGL graphics, but we absolutely hammer both the card itself and the data flow between card and main memory so I'm hoping that we will learn something from this.

By the way can I add that when I first had the chance to use VTune Amplifier all those (can't remember) years ago it got my "favourite piece of software of the 21st century" award, and nothing I have seen or used since then has knocked it off that top spot.   I simply do not know how we would have achieved the performance improvements we have without it, to me it is what an MRI scanner must be to a doctor.

[AthiraM_Intel]

Hi,

Thank you for your kind words and appreciation. We are glad to know that your issue got resolved.

You could refer the below link to know more about the gpu profiling

https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/documentation/vtune-help/top/command-line-interface/running-command-line-analysis/running-gpu-profiling-analysis-from-the-command-line.html

We would discontinue monitoring this thread, please raise a new thread if you have further issues.We would be happy to help you out.

Again, Thank you for taking time to share your sincere thoughts about Vtune .

Thanks.