Comparison of FOSS based profiling tools in Linux operating system environment

Abstract

Current computing systems comes with different power management and profiling tools to run the system in its optimal state. Though the hardware systems have advanced a lot in-terms of energy efficiency and computing power, the software's energy and resources efficiency is still lacking behind. In many cases due to poor/bad designing of software it cannot utilize the hardware efficiently and end up a system with high energy consumption. To address this issues software' s need a careful profiling in its development process to make the software efficient and less resource hungry. In this paper we compared some of the profiling tools available as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) which are used under Linux environment. These software tools uses different strategies and have different accuracies in finding a system and software programs behavior and its resource requirements. Their performance and resource overheads such as memory, CPU, disk consumption were compared and results are summarized for making the tools selection easier to researchers and developers alike. Another important issue with these tools are that, their reporting formats are not always easy to understand and it makes them less user friendly.