perf report: Add --max-stack option to limit callchain stack scan
When callgraph data was included in the perf data file, it may take a
long time to scan all those data and merge them together especially if
the stored callchains are long and the perf data file itself is large,
like a Gbyte or so.
The callchain stack is currently limited to PERF_MAX_STACK_DEPTH (127).
This is a large value. Usually the callgraph data that developers are
most interested in are the first few levels, the rests are usually not
looked at.
This patch adds a new --max-stack option to perf-report to limit the
depth of callchain stack data to look at to reduce the time it takes for
perf-report to finish its processing. It trades the presence of trailing
stack information with faster speed.
The following table shows the elapsed time of doing perf-report on a
perf.data file of size 985,531,828 bytes.
--max_stack Elapsed Time Output data size
----------- ------------ ----------------
not set 88.0s 124,422,651
64 87.5s 116,303,213
32 87.2s 112,023,804
16 86.6s 94,326,380
8 59.9s 33,697,248
4 40.7s 10,116,637
-g none 27.1s 2,555,810
Signed-off-by: Waiman Long <Waiman.Long@hp.com>
Acked-by: David Ahern <dsahern@gmail.com>
Cc: Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@intel.com>
Cc: Aswin Chandramouleeswaran <aswin@hp.com>
Cc: David Ahern <dsahern@gmail.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
Cc: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@redhat.com>
Cc: Namhyung Kim <namhyung@kernel.org>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Scott J Norton <scott.norton@hp.com>
Cc: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1382107129-2010-4-git-send-email-Waiman.Long@hp.com
Signed-off-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
diff --git a/tools/perf/Documentation/perf-report.txt b/tools/perf/Documentation/perf-report.txt
index be5ad87..10a2798 100644
--- a/tools/perf/Documentation/perf-report.txt
+++ b/tools/perf/Documentation/perf-report.txt
@@ -141,6 +141,14 @@
Default: fractal,0.5,callee,function.
+--max-stack::
+ Set the stack depth limit when parsing the callchain, anything
+ beyond the specified depth will be ignored. This is a trade-off
+ between information loss and faster processing especially for
+ workloads that can have a very long callchain stack.
+
+ Default: 127
+
-G::
--inverted::
alias for inverted caller based call graph.