what are the steps/strategy to analyze and improve performance of an embedded system

Question

I will break down this question in to sub questions. I am confused if I should ask them separately or in one question. So I will just stick to one SO question.

1. What are generally the steps to analyze and improve performance of C applications?

2. Do these steps change if I am developing for an embedded system?

3. What tools are out there which can help me?

Recently I have been given a task to improve the performance of our product on ARM11 platform. I am relatively new to this field of embedded systems and need gurus here on SO to help me out.

Answer 1

simply changing compilers can improve your C performance for the same source code by many times over. GCC has not necessarily gotten better for performance over the years, for some programs gcc 3.x produces much tighter code than 4.x. Back when I had access to the tools, ARMs compiler produced significantly better code than gcc. As much as 3 or 4 times faster. LLVM has caught up to GCC 4.x and I suspect will pass gcc by in terms of performance and overall use for cross compiling embedded code. Try different versions of gcc, 3.x and 4.x if you are using gcc. Metaware's compiler and arms adt ran circles around gcc3.x, gcc3.x will give gcc4.x a run for its money with arm code, for thumb code gcc4.x is better and for thumb2 (which doesnt apply to you) gcc4.x also better. Remember I have not said a word about changing a single line of code (yet).

LLVM is capable of full program optimization in addition to infinitely more tuning knobs than gcc. Despite that the code generated (ver 27) is only just catching up to the current gcc 4.x in terms of performance for the few programs I tried. And I didnt try the n factoral number of optimization combinations (optimize on the compile step, different options for each file, or combine two files or three files or all files and optimize those bundles, my theory is do no optimization on the C to bc steps, link all the bc together then do a single optimization pass on the whole program, the allow the default optimization when llc takes it to the target).

By the same token simply knowing your compiler and the optimizations can greatly improve the performance of the code without having to change any of it. You have an ARM11 arr you compiling for arm11 or generic arm? You can gain a few to a dozen percent by telling the compiler specifically which architecture/family (armv6 for example) over the generic armv4 (ARM7) that is often chosen as the default. Knowing to use -O2 or -O3 if you are brave.

It is often not the case but switching to thumb mode can improve performance for specific platforms. Doesnt apply to you but the gameboy advance is a perfect example, loaded with non-zero wait state 16 bit busses. Thumb has a handful of a percent overhead because it takes more instructions to do the same thing, but by increasing the fetch times, and taking advantage of some of the sequential read features of the gba thumb code can run significantly faster than arm code for the same source code.

having an arm11 you probably have an L1 and maybe L2 cache, are they on? Are they configured? Do you have an mmu and is your heavy use memory cached? or are you running zero wait state memory and dont need a cache and should turn it off? In addition to not realizing that you can take the same source code and make it run many times faster by changing compilers or options, folks often dont realize that when you use a cache simply adding a single up to a few nops in your startup code (as a trick to adjust where code lands in memory by one, two, a few words) you can change your codes execution speed by as much as 10 to 20 percent. Where those cache line reads hit in heavily used functions/loops makes a big difference. Even saving one cache line read by adjusting where the code lands is noticeable (cutting it from 3 to 2 or 2 to 1 for example).

Knowing your architecture, both the processor and your memory environment is where the tuning if any would start. Most C libraries if you are high level enough to use one (I often dont use a C library as I run without an operating system and with very limited resources) both in their C code and sometimes add some assembler to make bottleneck routines like memcpy, much faster. If your programs are operating on aligned 32 or even better 64 bit addresses, and you adjust even if it means using a handful of bytes more memory for every structure/array/memcpy to be an integral multiple of 32 bits or 64 bits you will see noticeable improvements (if your code uses structs or copies data in other ways). In addition to getting your structures (if you use them, I certainly dont with embedded code) size aligned, even if you waste memory, getting elements aligned, consider using 32 bit integers for every element instead of bytes or halfwords. Depending on your memory system this can help (it can hurt too btw). As with the GBA example above looking at specific functions that either by profiling or intuition you know are not being implemented in a manner that takes advantage of your processor or platform or libraries you may want to turn to assembler either from scratch or compiling from C initially then disassembling and hand tuning. Memcpy is a good example you may know your systems memory performance and may chose to create your own memcpy specifically for aligned data, copying 64 or 128 or more bits per instruction.

Likewise mixing global and local variables can make a noticeable performance difference. Traditionally folks are told never to use globals, but in embedded this isnt necessarily true, depends on how deeply embedded and how much tuning and speed and other factors you are interested in. This is a touchy subject and I may get flamed for it, so I will leave it at that.

The compiler has to burn and evict registers in order to make function calls, plus if you use local variables a stack frame may be required, so function calls are expensive, but at the same time, depending on the code within a function that has now grown in size by avoiding functions, you may create the problem you were trying to avoid, evicting registers to re-use them. Even a single line of C code can make the difference between all the variables in a function fits in registers to having to start evicting a bunch of registers. For functions or segments of code where you know you need some performance gain compile and disassemble (and look at register usage, how often it fetches memory or writes to memory). You can and will find places where you need to take a well used loop and make it its own function even though the function call has a penalty because by doing that the compiler can better optimize the loop and not evict/reuse registers and you get an overall net gain. Even a single extra instruction in a loop that goes around hundreds of times is a measurable performance hit.

Hopefully you already know to absolutely not compile for debug, turn all of the compile for debug options off. You may already know that code compile for debug that runs without bugs doesnt mean it is debugged, compiling for debug and using debuggers hide bugs leaving them as time bombs in your code for your final compile for release. Learn to always compile for release and test with the release version both for performance and finding bugs in your code.

Most instruction sets do not have a divide function. Avoid using divides or modulo in your code as much as humanly possible they are performance killers. Naturally this is not the case for powers of two, to save the compiler and to mentally avoid divides and modulos try to use shifts and ands. Multplies are easier and more often found in instruction sets, but are still costly. This is a good case to write assembler to do your multiplies instead of letting the C copiler do it. The arm multiply is a 32bit * 32bit = 32 bit so to do accurate math without overflowing there has to be extra C code wrapped around the multiply, if you already know you wont overflow, burn the registers for a function call and do the multiply in assembler (for the arm).

Likewise most instruction sets do not have a floating point unit, with yours you might, even so avoid float if at all possible. If you have to use float that is a whole other pandora's box of performance issues. Most folks dont see the performance problems with code as simple as this:

float a,b;

...

a = b * 7.0;

The rest of the problem is not understanding floating point accuracy and how good or bad the C libraries are just trying to get your constants into floating point form. Again float is a whole other long discussion on performance problems.

I am a product of Michael Abrash (I actually have a print copy of zen of assembly language) and the bottom line is time your code. Come up with an accurate way to time the code, you may think you know where the bottlenecks are and you may think you know your architecture but trying different things even if you think they are wrong, and timing them you may find and eventually have to figure out the error in your thinking. Adding nops to start.S as a final tuning step is a good example of this, all the other work you have done for performance can be instantly erased by not having a good alignment with the cache, this also means re-arranging functions within your source code so that they land in different places in the binary image. I have seen 10 to 20 percent swings of speed increase and decrease as a result of cache line alignments.