HOWTO use oprofile
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This is a brief HOWTO on using oprofile to statistically sample the execution performance of an ns-3 program.
Background
Please read this tutorial on oprofile: http://ssvb.github.com/2011/08/23/yet-another-oprofile-tutorial.html
There are several open source profilers, including gprof, oprofile, sysprof, and valgrind. This HOWTO focuses on oprofile, which is a good tool for ns-3 because ns-3 programs are logic-heavy with lots of small functions and templates, and therefore a statistical profiler such as oprofile is more relevant than a profile that counts instructions such as gprof or valgrind.
Use
oprofile is available as a package on Linux distros (e.g. 'yum install oprofile').
First, it is strongly recommended to build ns-3 as optimized code before profiling.
./waf configure -d optimized --enable-examples --enable-static
Second, you will need to run as root. Third you will want to run the program outside of waf, which may require you to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable to find the ns-3 libraries.
# opcontrol --deinit # opcontrol --no-vmlinux # opcontrol --separate=kernel # opcontrol --init # opcontrol --reset # opcontrol --start # ./test-program # opcontrol --stop # opreport -l ./test-program
Example
TBD