Measurement

Sets the checklist that finds the saturated resource before any profiler is opened.

Draws the line between counting, sampling, instrumentation and tracing, so a question is matched to its tool.

Also in §1

The reference for time a CPU sampler cannot see, off-CPU, scheduler and I/O waits, traced at bounded cost.

Makes a tracing hypothesis a one-line experiment over kprobes, uprobes, tracepoints and PMU events.

The design continuous profilers descend from, always-on sampling across a fleet, cheap enough to leave running.

Defines the counting and sampling modes every Linux profiler uses, and the sample record fields, branch stack included.

Defines skid, why a sample lands after the culprit, and how tagging one op through the pipeline removes it.

Defines the architectural counters, what a PEBS sample captures, and why rdtsc counts time, not cycles, under DVFS.

Also in §7§13

Defines the event encodings and IBS registers for one Zen core, the tables perf's AMD events are derived from.

Defines Arm SPE as perf drives it, one sampled op in flight, the filters, and what a record holds.

The maintainers' walk from perf stat to perf record to perf annotate, with the sample fields each flag sets.

Home of the user guide and cookbook, where each hardware analysis is defined by the events behind it.

The vendor's reference for IBS-driven profiling on Zen, with metric presets defined per core generation.

Records the design decisions, width as sample share and alphabetical rather than time order, behind its reading rules.

Proves a hot function need not be worth optimising, by measuring what speeding up a line does to end-to-end time.

The origin of measurement bias as a term, link order and environment size alone flipping a compiler flag comparison.

Traces run-to-run variation in x86 retired-instruction counts to one extra count per interrupt and per fault.

Defines what each clock counts, NTP-slewed or raw monotonic time, or CPU time, and the resolution call.

The compiler project's recipe for a quiet Linux host, governor, boost, SMT siblings, ASLR, a cpuset and tmpfs.

Documents the barriers that keep the optimiser from deleting the work under test, and repetition statistics.