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

4 HP Caliper Measurement Configuration Files
Each run of HP Caliper uses a particular measurement, which you can specify in the command
line. Each measurement corresponds to a particular measurement configuration file supplied by
HP Caliper. The measurement configuration files contain variables that control the types of
measurements performed and the content of the reports.
You can perform all the HP Caliper measurements without looking at or even knowing about the
measurement configuration files, using the default settings in the files.
HP Caliper measurement configuration files are provided with the software kit and reside in the
HP Caliper home directory in the config subdirectory. (By default, the home directory is /opt/
caliper/ on HP-UX and /opt/hp-caliper/ on Linux.)
You can use these existing measurement configuration files or modify them or even create your
own measurement configuration files.
Measurement Configuration Files Provided with HP Caliper
The measurement configuration files provided with HP Caliper and the performance measurements
they take are shown below:
• alat
The alat measurement measures and reports sampled advance load address table (ALAT)
misses. The ALAT keeps track of speculative (that is, advance) loads. An excessive number of
ALAT compares that result in a failed advance load (an ALAT miss) can seriously degrade
performance. See “alat Measurement Report Description” (p. 169).
• branch
The branch measurement measures and reports sampled branch mispredictions. See “branch
Measurement Report Description” (p. 173).
• cgprof (HP-UX only)
The cgprof measurement measures and reports a call graph profile, produced by instrumenting
the application code. See “cgprof Report Description ” (p. 178).
• cpu (HP-UX only)
The cpu measurement measures and reports per-process metrics based on sampled CPU events.
See “Performing CPU Metrics Analysis ” (p. 152).
• cstack
The cstack measurement measures and reports a sampled call stack profile, produced by
periodically sampling the application program counter and each of its thread's call stacks.
See “Producing a Sampled Call Stack Profile Analysis” (page 133) and “cstack Measurement
Report Description” (page 184).
• cycles (Integrity Servers dual-core Itanium 2 processor and Itanium 9300 quad-core processor
only)
The cycles measurement measures and reports a flat profile of the instruction pointers (IPs).
See “cycles Measurement Report Description ” (p. 186).
• dcache
The dcache measurement measures and reports sampled data cache metrics. See “dcache
Measurement Report Description” (p. 191).
42 HP Caliper Measurement Configuration Files