4 ms·

I’ve been around long enough to have had frame pointers pretty ubiquitously, then lost them, and now starting to have them again. The dark times in the middle

by dap 2y ago

I’ve been around long enough to have had frame pointers pretty ubiquitously, then lost them, and now starting to have them again. The dark times in the middle were painful. For the software I’ve worked on, the easy dynamic profiling using frame pointers (eg using DTrace) has given far more in performance wins than omitting them would have. (Part of my beef with the article is that while edge cases do break some samples, in practice it’s a very small fraction, and almost by definition not the important ones if you’re trying to find heavy on-CPU code paths.) I get that some use cases may be better without frame pointers. A well-resourced team can always recompile the world, whichever the default is. It’s just that my experience is that most software is not already perfectly tuned and I’d much rather the default be more easily observable.

thegeomaster 2y ago
Look, it's likely we just come from different backgrounds. Most of my perf-sensitive work was optimizing inner loops with SIMD, allowing the compiler to inline hot functions, creating better data structures to make use of the CPU cache, etc. Frame pointer prologue overhead was measurable on most of our use-cases. I have a smaller amount of experience on profiling systems where calls trace across multiple processes, so maybe I haven't felt this pain enough. Though I still think the onus should be on teams to be able to comfortably recompile---not the world---but some part of it. After all, a lot of tuning can only be done through compile flags, such as turning off codepaths/capabilities which are unnecessary.
- dap 2y ago
  Makes sense. I wasn't exaggerating about recompiling the world, though. Even if we say I'm only interested in profiling my application, a single library compiled without frame pointers makes useless any samples where code in that library was at the top of the stack. I've seen that be libc, openssl, some random Node module or JNI thing, etc. You can't just throw out those samples because they might still be your application's problem. For me in those situations, I would have needed to recompile most of the packages we got from both the OS distro and the supplemental package repo.
- audidude 2y ago
  I think your viewpoint is valid. My experience is on performance tuning the other side you mention. Cross-application, cross-library, whole-system, daemons, etc. Basically, "the whole OS as it's shipped to users". For my case, I need the whole system setup correctly before it even starts to be useful. For your case, you only need the specific library or application compiled correctly. The rest of the system is negligible and probably not even used. Who would optimize SIMD routines next to function calls anyway?

by dap 2y ago

thegeomaster 2y ago

Look, it's likely we just come from different backgrounds. Most of my perf-sensitive work was optimizing inner loops with SIMD, allowing the compiler to inline hot functions, creating better data structures to make use of the CPU cache, etc. Frame pointer prologue overhead was measurable on most of our use-cases. I have a smaller amount of experience on profiling systems where calls trace across multiple processes, so maybe I haven't felt this pain enough. Though I still think the onus should be on teams to be able to comfortably recompile---not the world---but some part of it. After all, a lot of tuning can only be done through compile flags, such as turning off codepaths/capabilities which are unnecessary.

dap 2y ago
Makes sense. I wasn't exaggerating about recompiling the world, though. Even if we say I'm only interested in profiling my application, a single library compiled without frame pointers makes useless any samples where code in that library was at the top of the stack. I've seen that be libc, openssl, some random Node module or JNI thing, etc. You can't just throw out those samples because they might still be your application's problem. For me in those situations, I would have needed to recompile most of the packages we got from both the OS distro and the supplemental package repo.
audidude 2y ago
I think your viewpoint is valid. My experience is on performance tuning the other side you mention. Cross-application, cross-library, whole-system, daemons, etc. Basically, "the whole OS as it's shipped to users". For my case, I need the whole system setup correctly before it even starts to be useful. For your case, you only need the specific library or application compiled correctly. The rest of the system is negligible and probably not even used. Who would optimize SIMD routines next to function calls anyway?