Performance Counters View

Use the Performance Counters view to display information on performance counter traces. By default, the Performance Counters view opens up as minimised on the PIAnalyzer main view. To view the graphs, click the restore button or the maximize button on the Title bar.

The Performance Counters displayed in the view include two user selected traces (A and B in Figure 1) and CPU cycles (C in Figure 1). A MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second) counter is also available if Instructions executed has been selected as one of the traces.

You can select which traces are displayed in the graphs view by clicking the check box next to the trace name in the legend table below the graphs. When several traces are selected, a separate graph line is displayed for each trace, as shown in Figure 1.

In the top left-hand corner of each graph line, the following information displayed:

Note that the scaling of the graphs changes according to the maximum values for each graph. You can see the vertical axis values for each graph on the left side of the graph.

A legend table is displayed below the graphs.

Figure 1. Performance Counters view with all trace graphs displayed

Description of the table columns:

Check the boxes at the right side of the table to select the traces for the graphs view.

Columns may be reordered, resized, and sorted by clicking or dragging column headers.

You can right-click on the table to open a context menu, where you can select to copy either selected lines or the entire table to clipboard; or to save the table to CSV format.


MIPS counter and graph

The Million Instructions Per Second (MIPS) graph gives you a general idea of CPU speed in a measured use case. The basic use case for the MIPS analysis would be to check any low areas in the graph since they may reveal unoptimized features, for example, in terms of memory access (reads and writes). The higher the MIPS values, the better and the faster the CPU is in executing instructions.

A MIPS (Million Instructions Per Millisecond) graph is displayed in the Performance Counters view, when Instructions executed has been selected as one of the counters. If Instructions executed has been selected, the dialog below is displayed during PIAnalyser file import:

Figure 1. MIPS Graph Generation

The processor speed information is needed for calculating the data for the MIPS graph. The rest of the data for the calculation is included in the Instructions executed and CPU cycles counters.

The MIPS counter information is displayed in the graphs view and the legend table together with the other performance counters. Note, however, that for MIPS only Average (1/ms), Min (1/ms), and Max (1/ms) information is displayed in the legend table.


Related references