Identify Performance Bottlenecks - 2021.2 English

Vitis Unified Software Platform Documentation: Application Acceleration Development (UG1393)

Document ID
UG1393
Release Date
2022-03-29
Version
2021.2 English

In a purely sequential application, performance bottlenecks can be easily identified by looking at profiling reports. However, most real-life applications are multi-threaded and it is important to the take the effects of parallelism in consideration when looking for performance bottlenecks.

The following figure represents the performance profile of an application with two parallel paths. The width of each rectangle is proportional to the performance of each function.

Figure 1. Application with Two Parallel Paths

The above performance visualization in the context of parallelism shows that accelerating only one of the two paths does not improve the application's overall performance. Because paths A and B re-converge, they are dependent upon each other to finish. Likewise, accelerating A2, even by 100x, does not have a significant impact on the performance of the upper path. Therefore, the performance bottlenecks in this example are functions A1, B1, B2, and B3.

When looking for acceleration candidates, consider the performance of the entire application, not just of individual functions.