For medium-large targets, several methods are available to minimize the amount of data collected and target execution time. Minimizing the data collected reduces the amount of data you need to examine; it also reduces the size of the generated result.
The Survey tool recognizes only two annotations:
Pause Collection: Stops data collection to skip uninteresting parts of the target program's execution. This minimizes the data collected and speeds up the analysis of medium-large applications.
Resume Collection: Resumes data collection previously paused to collect data about the interesting parts of your program.
The Survey tool provides several ways to start target execution with data collection paused or paused for a specified time: from the GUI, using an Intel Advisor Option, or a command line option. Starting collection paused for a specified time lets you automatically skip data/program initialization and related setup steps without modifying your source code. Starting collection paused (without a time) lets you automatically skip data/program initialization and related setup steps but your target needs to execute a Resume Collection annotation.
The Survey tool also provides Pause and Resume (collection) buttons in the Workflow tab that are equivalent to executing the Pause Collection and Resume Collection annotations. You might use these GUI buttons instead of the annotations in certain cases, such as your initial profiling runs.
The recommended method is to:
Do one of the following to start the tool and target execution:
In the Workflow tab, click the
button below
Survey Target.
Before you run the tool, enable the equivalent Resume collection after, ms checkbox in the Analysis Target tab of the Project Properties dialog box to start collection paused for a specified time.
On the command line, use --collect with either the --start-paused or --resume-after options.
If you use the
button or
--start-paused option, execute the Resume Collection annotation to begin data collection of the first interesting part of the program.
Execute pairs of Pause Collection and Resume Collection annotations to collect data about the interesting part(s) of the target program. Place Pause Collection and Resume Collection annotations outside the parallel site begin and parallel site end annotations.
When using the Intel Advisor GUI, you can specify the Sampling interval and the Duration time estimate in the Analysis Target tab of the Project Properties dialog box. You should provide a Duration time estimate if target execution takes multiple hours, because this can increase the Sampling interval used during data collection to minimize result size. You can also directly adjust the Sampling interval:
To minimize excessive result size, increase the Sampling interval.
To increase the accuracy of collected data (and result size), reduce the Sampling interval.