Large page analysis

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The tprof -a command collects profile trace from a representative application run and produces performance projections for mapping different portions of the application's data space to different page sizes.

Large Page Analysis uses the information in the trace to project translation buffer performance when mapping any of the following four application memory regions to a different page size:
  • static application data (initialized and uninitialized data)
  • application heap (dynamically allocated data)
  • stack
  • application text

The performance projections are provided for each of the page sizes supported by the operating system. The first performance projection is a baseline projection for mapping all four memory regions to the default 4 KB pages. Subsequent projections map one region at a time to a different page size. The statistics reported for each projection include: the page size, the number of pages needed to back all four regions, a translation miss score, and a cold translation miss score.

The summary section lists the processes profiled and the statistics reported including: number/percentage of memory reference, modeled memory reference, malloc calls, and free calls.