Slicer3:Performance Analysis

Slicer 3 Performance Analysis

We are looking into performance analysis on the Slicer3 codebase in order to streamline execution where possible, identify parts of the program to optimize, and determine which parts of Slicer3 are using the most system resources. We are currently in the process of determining which profilers to use on the various Slicer platforms.

Tools

Statistical Profilers

• GNU gprof
  • gprof is not a good profiler for our needs because it doesn't support profiling multithreaded code.
• oprofile
• Shark 4 (OSX)

Profilers for Multi-threaded Applications

• Intel's VTune for Linux ($)
• TAU
• Threadmon: Thread usage/blockage
• TotalView ($)
• PerfSuite (POSIX Threads)
• GProf work-around for multi-threaded apps
• References on multi-threaded profiling and code optimization
  • General C++ performance optimization
  • Multi-threaded performance measurement (pdf document)
  • Wikipedia - General performance analysis

Runtime Instrumentation

• Callgrind / KcacheGrind

An initial valgrind suppressions file for slicer is in subversion. It includes an example command line to run it with slicer that also uses the VTK, ITK, KWWidgets suppression files.

Targets

• DICOM reader / GDCM
• vtkITK
• ImageReslice
• ITK resampler w/ deformable transform

Sample Files

oprofile:

• oprofile; run Slicer3 and exit
• oprofile; run Slicer3, load DICOM, exit

KCachegrind:

• KCachegrind; run Slicer3, load DICOM, exit
• KCachegrind; run Slicer3, load DICOM, exit