HP Caliper 5.3 User Guide (5900-1558, February 2011)

11 Producing a Sampled Call Stack Profile Analysis
HP Caliper can produce a sampled call stack profile report (using the cstack measurement) from
any compiled program. You do not need to compile your program in any special way to use this
feature. HP Caliper periodically samples the application program counter and each of its thread's
call stacks and then creates a call stack profile of the program's execution.
For more information about the report produced by the cstack measurement, see “cstack
Measurement Report Description” (page 181).
Running HP Caliper to Produce a Call Stack Profile
You can start HP Caliper from the command line, a shell script, or your program's makefile to
produce a call stack profile. The syntax is:
caliper cstack [caliper_options] program [program_arguments]
For example, the following command creates a call stack profile report in the file named
results.save when profiling the program enh_thr_mutex1.
$ /opt/caliper/bin/caliper cstack -o results.save enh_thr_mutex1
You can use the --frame-depth option to change the maximum number of stack frames to
unwind while collecting call stack samples. The default value is 32. See “--frame-depth” (page 61).
You can use the -s or --sampling-spec option to specify the sampling period. See “-s or
--sampling-spec” (page 52).
You can use the --group-by executable option to generate a per-executable call stack profile
report merged across processes. You can use the caliper merge command to merge cstack
data from multiple collection runs.
By default a cstack run collects the blocking primitives data, and a "Blocking Primitives" section
will appear in the cstack reports if there are any samples that are blocked waiting for a thread
primitive (mutex, condition variable, or rwlock) or inter process blocking primitive (like
semaphore, socket, pipe, or file descriptor).
If an application is linked with libpthread version 11.31_BL2009_1012_2 (or later), the "Blocking
Primitive Details" section would appear instead in the cstack report with information about holder
and waiter threads for thread primitives (for example, mutexes). See “Thread Synchronization
Primitive's Holder and Waiter Thread Analysis (HP-UX 11.31 only)” (page 147).
When HP Caliper is run as root, cstack measurement now records and reports both user and
kernel space portions of the call stack (HP-UX only).
Call Stack Profile Text Report Example for HP-UX
An example report for HP Caliper on HP-UX is shown here. This report is the result of this command
line:
$ /opt/caliper/bin/caliper cstack -o results.save enh_thr_mutex1
132 Producing a Sampled Call Stack Profile Analysis