36. Profile Your Application

Intel processors provide performance counters to monitor events. Some tools provided by Intel can be used to profile and benchmark an application. See the VTune Performance Analyzer Essentials publication from Intel Press for more information.

For a DPDK application, this can be done in a Linux* application environment only.

The main situations that should be monitored through event counters are:

• Cache misses
• Branch mis-predicts
• DTLB misses
• Long latency instructions and exceptions

Refer to the Intel Performance Analysis Guide for details about application profiling.