Optimizing your software

Performance analysis tools

A common phrase in software optimization is "you can only optimize what you can measure".

This means that to improve the performance of your code, you must be able to accurately measure performance so that you can analyze where bottlenecks are occurring, make optimizations, and measure the improvements.

The right tool for this depends on the Arm platform you are working with.

RTOS and Android

Arm Streamline is the tool of choice for optimizing applications and systems for these platforms. Streamline is part of the Arm Development Studio and Arm Mobile Studio products. 

• Using Streamline to Optimize Applications for Mali GPUs shows you how to use the Arm Streamline performance analyzer to optimize the graphics in Android applications running on Mali-400 and Mali T-600 GPUs.
• Streamline with the Raspberry Pi 3 is a practical tutorial that shows how to use the Arm DS-5 Streamline performance analyzer to analyze code performance running on the Raspberry Pi.
• Using Streamline with Fast Models and Fixed Virtual Platforms shows how you can analyze performance even when you don't have a hardware target by using the Arm Fast Models and Fixed Virtual Platforms.
• Analyzing the performance of RTOS-based systems using Streamline shows how to analyze the performance of RTOS systems, using Keil RTX version 5 RTOS on an Arm Cortex-M33 processor.
• Streamline performance analysis using local capture mode shows how you can analyze performance when it’s not possible to send live data back to the host over a network or USB connection.

Linux

For Linux systems, there is a rich ecosystem of tooling from Arm and the open source community. 

• For 64-bit Linux, Arm Forge MAP enables profiling of multi-threaded and multi-process C, C++, Fortran and Python applications. Available as a standalone tool or as part of Arm Allinea Studio, Forge supports all major Linux distributions. The tool has advanced support for both CPU, application I/O, and MPI communication (for HPC applications). It can be used to identify end-to-end application performance problems such CPU bottlenecks, thread synchronization, and I/O problems.
  • Read about using Arm Forge to profile and optimize large scale high-performance computing (HPC) applications.
  • Find out more about Python profiling in our blog Profiling Python and compiled code with Arm Forge – and a performance surprise.
  • More information about Arm Forge MAP and the Arm Allinea Studio suite.
• Arm Streamline is a system profiler that can discover your software hot spots, via program counter sampling, as well as performance counter and process statistics. It can display per-core and per-process hardware event counters from Arm CPUs and Mali GPUs. Streamline for Linux is available as part of Arm Development Studio.
• Perftools, the widely used command line Linux tools for hardware counters and other performance measurement, are available for Arm systems.