I use it - perf is wonderful. Back in the dark days of grad school, getting performance counter data for your program required hacking your code to call into PA

I use it - perf is wonderful. Back in the dark days of grad school, getting performance counter data for your program required hacking your code to call into PAPI (http://icl.cs.utk.edu/papi/overview/ http://icl.cs.utk.edu/papi/overview/). Being able to tell a program, "Hey, run this for me, and tell me how many branch mispredictions there are. And where they happen" is like magic. If you do any performance analysis of software, learn perf. Official manual: https://perf.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page https://perf.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page Brendan Gregg's perf page: http://www.brendangregg.com/perf.html http://www.brendangregg.com/perf.html