Summary

1. Prepare for analysis

You built the target in the Release mode, created the performance baseline, and created the VTune Amplifier project for your analysis target.

• Create a performance baseline to compare the application versions before and after optimization. Make sure to use the same workload for each application run.

• Create a VTune Amplifier project and u se the Analysis Target tab to choose and configure your analysis target.

• Use the Analysis Type tab to choose, configure, and run the analysis. You can also run the analysis from command line using the amplxe-cl command.

2. Find hotspots

You launched the Basic Hotspots data collection that analyzes function calls and CPU time spent in each program unit of your application and identified the following hotspots:

• Identified a function that took the most CPU time and could be a good candidate for algorithm tuning.

• Identified the code section that took the most CPU time to execute.

• Start analyzing the performance of your application from the Summary window to explore the performance metrics for the whole application. Then, move to the Bottom-up window to analyze the performance per function. Focus on the hotspots - functions that took the most CPU time. By default, they are located at the top of the table.

• Double-click the hotspot function in the Bottom-up pane or Call Stack pane to open its source code and identify the code line that took the most CPU time.

3. Eliminate hotspots

You interchanged the loops in the hotspot function, rebuilt the application, and got performance gain of 19.633 seconds.

Use the Source Editor button to open the code editor from the VTune Amplifier directly at the hotspot line.

4. Check your work

You ran the Basic Hotspots analysis on the optimized code and compared the results before and after optimization using the Compare mode of the VTune Amplifier. Compare analysis results regularly to look for regressions and to track how incremental changes to the code affect its performance. You may also want to use the VTune Amplifier command-line interface and run the amplxe-cl command to test your code for regressions. For more details, see the Command-line Interface Support section in the VTune Amplifier online help.

Perform regular regression testing by comparing analysis results before and after optimization. From GUI, click the Compare Results button on the VTune Amplifier toolbar. From command line, use the amplxe-cl command.