pmcTime -- use the Pentium Pro's performance mountering counters from the command line

Usage

pmcTime works like the Unix time program (or shell builtin, if you prefer). Instead of measuring realtime, user and system time, it counts any two of the various Pentium Pro (or Pentium II) internal counters.

Usage:
pmcTime counter1 counter2 program program arguments
Example

pmcTime FLOPS IFU_IFETCH make clean

This will measure the number of floating point operations and instruction fetches while running a make clean. Actually, this isn't quite true. pmcTime measure all events on the system while the subordinate program is running. Therefore, it is most accurate on an otherwise idle machine. Taking the average of several runs, after discarding outliers is probably a better way to measure this data. home