Measure page faults from a c program

Question

I am comparing a few system calls where I read/write from/to memory. Is there any API defined to measure page faults (pages in/out) in C ?

I found this library libperfstat.a but it is for AIX, I couldn't find anything for linux.

Edit: I am aware of time & perf-stat commands in linux, just exploring if there is anything available for me to use inside the C program.

Answer 1

It is not an API as such, however I have had a lot of success by rolling my own and reading /proc/myPID/stat from within my C program which includes page fault statistics for my process, this allows me to monitor counts in real time as my program runs and store these however I like.

Remember that doing so can cause page faults in itself so there will be some inaccuracy but you will get a general idea.

See here for details of the format of the file: https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_MRG/1.3/html/Realtime_Reference_Guide/chap-Realtime_Reference_Guide-Memory_allocation.html

Answer 2

There is getrusage function (SVr4, 4.3BSD. POSIX.1-2001; but not all fields are defined in standard). In linux there are several broken fields, but man getrusage lists several interesting fields:

long   ru_minflt;        /* page reclaims (soft page faults) */
long   ru_majflt;        /* page faults (hard page faults) */

long   ru_inblock;       /* block input operations */
long   ru_oublock;       /* block output operations */

The rusage is also reported in wait4 (only usable in external program). This one is used by /usr/bin/time program (it prints minor/major pagefault counts).