Intel® VTune™ Profiler

User Guide

ID 766319
Date 12/20/2024
Public
Document Table of Contents

Temporary Directory for Performance Results on Linux* Targets

Configure a temporary directory for the remote or local data collection on Linux target systems.

When you run a hardware event-based sampling collection with Intel® VTune™ Profiler or configure the result directory for analysis on a mounted share, temporary data files are written to the system global temporary directory. Typically the global temporary directory is /tmp.

Depending on the duration of the VTune Profiler analysis and volume of data collected, the global temporary directory may require significant temporary disk space. The temporary data may exceed the current allocated or available global temporary storage space. In this situation, the VTune Profiler analysis can fail with this warning:

Warning: Cannot load data file `/home/user/r001hs/data.0/tbs0123456789.tb6' (tbrw call…..) failed: Invalid sample file (24).

Temporary files may no longer be in the temporary storage location, giving the appearance that plenty of space is available. In this case, check the temporary storage usage while the analysis is running. If the usage of system temporary storage reaches 100%, this may be the root cause of the error.

If the cause of the error is insufficient temporary disk space, set up an alternative temporary directory for collected data. VTune Profiler may still keep writing some scratch files of insignificant size (for example, the socket file sep_ipc_socket_0) to the system global temporary directory. However, VTune Profiler will utilize the defined alternative temporary location for the larger files such as those beginning with lwp (for example, lwp28478__wallclock.tb7, lwp28478_user.mrk, lwp28478_7.txt). When VTune Profiler completes the finalization, all temporary scratch files are removed.

Configuring an Alternative Temporary Directory for Local Targets

For local targets, set the standard Linux TMPDIR environment variable to an alternate directory path with the sufficient temporary storage space. To configure the TMPDIR environment variable, do the following:

  1. From within the shell where you will be running the VTune Profiler command line or GUI, assign a value and export TMPDIR, for example:

    > export TMPDIR=/directory_path/ tmp

  2. Verify the assignment:

    > echo $TMPDIR
  3. Verify directory permissions are sufficient for the directory assigned to TMPDIR:

    > ls -ld /directory_path/ tmp
  4. From the shell window, run the VTune Profiler hardware event-based sampling collection using either the command line or GUI.

Configuring an Alternative Temporary Directory for Remote Targets

To change the temporary directory for remote targets from GUI, do the following:

  1. Click the Configure Analysis button.

  2. Select the remote Linux (SSH) target system.

  3. In the Temporary directory on the remote system field specify your alternative temporary directory.

To specify an alternative temporary directory from the command line, use the target-tmp-dir option, for example:

host>./vtune --target-system=ssh:vtune@10.125.21.170 -target-tmp-dir=/home/tmp –collect hotspots -knob sampling-mode=hw -knob enable-stack-collection=true -- /home/samples/matrix