Unverified Commit ec7bfae0 authored by Andrei Eres's avatar Andrei Eres Committed by GitHub
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subsystem-bench: cache misses profiling (#2893)

## Why we need it
To provide another level of understanding to why polkadot's subsystems
may perform slower than expected. Cache misses occur when processing
large amounts of data, such as during availability recovery.

## Why Cachegrind
Cachegrind has many drawbacks: it is slow, it uses its own cache
simulation, which is very basic. But unlike `perf`, which is a great
tool, Cachegrind can run in a virtual machine. This means we can easily
run it in remote installations and even use it in CI/CD to catch
possible regressions.

Why Cachegrind and not Callgrind, another part of Valgrind? It is simply
empirically proven that profiling runs faster with Cachegrind.

## First results
First results have been obtained while testing of the approach. Here is
an example.

```
$ target/testnet/subsystem-bench --n-cores 10 --cache-misses data-availability-read
$ cat cachegrind_report.txt
I refs:        64,622,081,485
I1  misses:         3,018,168
LLi misses:           437,654
I1  miss rate:           0.00%
LLi miss rate:           0.00%

D refs:        12,161,833,115  (9,868,356,364 rd   + 2,293,476,751 wr)
D1  misses:       167,940,701  (   71,060,073 rd   +    96,880,628 wr)
LLd misses:        33,550,018  (   16,685,853 rd   +    16,864,165 wr)
D1  miss rate:            1.4% (          0.7%     +           4.2%  )
LLd miss rate:            0.3% (          0.2%     +           0.7%  )

LL refs:          170,958,869  (   74,078,241 rd   +    96,880,628 wr)
LL misses:         33,987,672  (   17,123,507 rd   +    16,864,165 wr)
LL miss rate:             0.0% (          0.0%     +           0.7%  )
```

The CLI output shows that 1.4% of the L1 data cache missed, which is not
so bad, given that the last-level cache had that data most of the time
missing only 0.3%. Instruction data of the L1 has 0.00% misses of the
time. Looking at an output file with `cg_annotate` shows that most of
the misses occur during reed-solomon, which is expected.
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