HP Caliper User Guide Release 5.5 (5900-2351, August 2012)

1 HP Caliper at a Glance
What Is HP Caliper?
HP Caliper is a general-purpose performance analysis tool for applications on HP-UX and Linux
systems running on HP Integrity Servers. HP Caliper allows you to understand the performance
and execution of your application and to identify ways to improve its run-time performance.
HP Caliper works with any native Integrity Server application. It does not require special compilation
of the program being analyzed and does not require any special link options or libraries. HP
Caliper supports programs compiled with any compiler option.
HP Caliper provides ways to:
• Measure the overall performance of a program
• Identify performance parameters of specific functions in a program
• Guide you in optimizing the performance of a program based on its specific execution profile
HP Caliper has two user interfaces:
• Graphical user interface (GUI)
• Command-line interface (CLI)
These two interfaces are part of the same product. You can mix-and-match your use of the GUI
and the command line.
The GUI can run either natively (locally) on the HP-UX or Linux Integrity server that HP Caliper is
running on, or remotely on a Windows x86 or Linux x86 desktop system.
HP Caliper operates in these modes:
• Data collection
• Report generation
• Performance analysis
The data collection output is saved automatically in a database for possible use later. Report
generation can be done in the data collection run or in separate report generation runs later.
The output data is delivered in multiple report formats, with source and assembly code, and
explanatory help text.
Figure 1 shows the HP Caliper components.
16 HP Caliper at a Glance