Home CentOS Installing and Using Perf in Ubuntu and CentOS

Installing and Using Perf in Ubuntu and CentOS

by Divya Kiran Kumar

Performance is one of the most complicated parts of systems administration.  Whenever you are trying to investigate the source of bad performance or the reason for the high workload, you need the right tools to do so.

Perf is one of those tools. It’s a performance counter for Linux that you can use to gather data about performance of your system.

We will see how to install it on Ubuntu and Centos and will do a small walkthrough of the basic command usage.

Installing Perf on Ubuntu

Perf is part of the package ‘linux-tools’ in Ubuntu and it is installed like any other package using apt. Just make sure you have sources updated.

sudo apt update

First, install package linux-tools-common:

sudo apt install linux-tools-common
Perf

Linux Tools Common Installation

Next, you need to specific package for your running kernel. To get the exact version of your kernel, use the following command:

uname -r

You will get the exact kernel version.

uname

Getting kernel version in Linux

You can install the specific linux-tools package or if there is no specific version of the package for your kernel, you can use the linux-tools-generic package. But this might not work as expected. As a rule of thumb, perf won’t work or won’t work as intended, if the linux-tools package does not match the running (very important! the running, not the installed) version of Linux kernel.

Installing Perf on CentOS

As usual, package names vary from CentOS to Ubuntu but the procedure is basically the same, first update package information:

yum update

There is a straight package that will trigger all dependencies in CentOS.

yum install perf
Centos install summary

Perf installation summary in CentOS

Basic usage of Perf Command

Let us see some basic commands on how to use perf. The most basic usage of perf is, of course, help page, with “–help” flag to see command summary

perf help result

Perf Usage Summary

Depending on your system configuration, some commands of perf might be limited by security policies. To disable those policies just use:

echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid

There are two big groups of commands: commands that are run over live system and commands that are run over a performance record.

Commands over a live system

perf list [category]

The above command lists all the available event types in the system. This is a long list and depending on the system configuration, it will be wrapped by less/more. If you provide a category value, only events on this category will be shown.

Available categories are: hw|sw|cache|tracepoint|pmu|event_glob

Perf list output

Available software events in Perf

perf bench <category> <benchmark>

The above command makes several benchmarks on the system. They are split amongst different categories (sched, mem, numa, futex, all) and each category has a different list of benchmarks.

If you want to check all memory speed tests, use the below command:

perf bench mem all
Perf bench result

Perf memory benchmark result

perf stat <command>

The above command will return the performance stats. It will output something like this

Perf Stat Result

Results of perf stat execution

perf top

This will display a live analysis of system profile, like top, but more fine-tuned.

Perf Top Result

Example screen of perf top output

Here starts the second group of commands.

Commands over a Performance record

You can record a performance profile of any command you execute using the following command line:

perf record [options]
result of perf record

Result of perf record for ls -laR

This will produce a raw performance registers record. How deep this record is, will depend on the installation of your system. You might need debug or dev packages to get all the profiling data you might get. There are also a lot of flags that will allow us to control what will be profiled, how it will be saved and how often it will be profiled.

Once we have the performance record, there are several commands to act with this data, the easiest one is as follows:

perf report -i <perf file> [options]
perf report result

Result of perf report on ls -laR command

This will generate a report of the performance file. We can select how to split or sort the data or which data we want in the report.

perf diff <datafile 1> <datafile 2> …

This will allow us to compare two executions, for example, if we want to know how the program is running after changing parameters compared with base execution.

perf lock -I <perf file>

This will analyze all lock events in a previously recorded performance file.

perf mem -t <Type> [ record <command> | report ]

This will record or report from a record, profiling on memory access of the type selected.

perf timechart

This will make a time chart of the execution of previously recorded profiling.

Bar chart of perf execution

Partial output of perf time chart

With all these tools in our hand, you can start checking what’s going on in your server, you can start doing profiles of executions to test different configurations and you will be armed with a vast set of tools to get control of the performance on your system.

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