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Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2015 08:37:21 -0600
From: David Ahern <david.ahern@oracle.com>
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To: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@redhat.com>
CC: acme@kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>,
        Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>, Jiri Olsa <jolsa@kernel.org>,
        Namhyung Kim <namhyung@kernel.org>,
        Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>,
        Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@intel.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] perf record: Allow poll timeout to be specified
References: <1427213388-127148-1-git-send-email-david.ahern@oracle.com> <20150325123855.GC26966@krava.brq.redhat.com>
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On 3/25/15 6:38 AM, Jiri Olsa wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 12:09:48PM -0400, David Ahern wrote:
>> Record currently wakes up based on watermarks to read events from the mmaps and
>> write them out to the file. The result is a file that can have large blocks of
>> events per mmap before a finished round event is added to the stream.  This in
>> turn affects the quantity of events that have to be passed through the ordered
>> events queue before results can be displayed to the user. For commands like
>> perf-script this can lead to long unnecessarily long delays before a user gets
>> output. Large systems (e.g, 1024 cpus) further compound this effect. I have seen
>> instances where I have to wait 45 minutes for perf-script to process a 5GB file
>> before any events are shown.
>
> so you have pipe to perf script, right?

$ perf record ....
$ perf script ...
<wait an eternity>
data

>
>>
>> This patch adds an option to perf-record to allow a user to specify the
>> poll timeout in msec. For example using 100 msec timeouts similar to perf-top
>> means the mmaps are traversed much more frequently leading to a smoother
>> analysis side.
>
> there's also the '--no-buffering' option that sets:
>
>                  attr->watermark = 0;
>                  attr->wakeup_events = 1;
>
> but that's just the other edge, which is not what you'd want

right, that is the other extreme. record would never go to sleep.

>
> I think it's good to have user side configurable as well
>
> Acked-by: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@kernel.org>
>
> thanks,
> jirka
>