Sampling, Time-based sampling – Intel ARCHITECTURE IA-32 User Manual
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Application Performance Tools
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Sampling
Sampling allows you to profile all active software on your system,
including operating system, device driver, and application software. It
works by occasionally interrupting the processor and collecting the
instruction address, process ID, and thread ID. After the sampling
activity completes, the VTune analyzer displays the data by process,
thread, software module, function, or line of source. There are two
methods for generating samples: Time-based sampling and Event-based
sampling.
Time-based Sampling
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Time-based sampling (TBS) uses an operating system’s (OS) timer
to periodically interrupt the processor to collect samples. The
sampling interval is user definable. TBS is useful for identifying the
software on your computer that is taking the most CPU time.