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Comment by dap | Hacker News Reader

This reads to me like FUD. Isn’t the fraction of profile samples in a prologue heavily workload dependent? And whichever way you go on frame pointers, there are winners and losers to including them by default.

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There are no performance winners if you include them by default. There will be an additional >0% overhead when you are executing additional code in the prologue and epilogue, and increasing the register pressure by removing rbp from being ever allocated.

There are only "winners" in the sense that people will be able to more easily see why their never-tuned system is so slow. On the other hand, you're punishing all perf-critical usecases with unnecessary overhead.

I believe if you have a slow system, it's up to you to profile and optimize it, and that includes even recompiling some software with different flags to enable profiling. It's not the job of upstream to make this easier for you if it means punishing those workloads where teams have diligently profiled and optimized through the years so that there is no, as the author says, low-hanging fruit to find.

I’ve been around long enough to have had frame pointers pretty ubiquitously, then lost them, and now starting to have them again. The dark times in the middle were painful. For the software I’ve worked on, the easy dynamic profiling using frame pointers (eg using DTrace) has given far more in performance wins than omitting them would have. (Part of my beef with the article is that while edge cases do break some samples, in practice it’s a very small fraction, and almost by definition not the important ones if you’re trying to find heavy on-CPU code paths.)

I get that some use cases may be better without frame pointers. A well-resourced team can always recompile the world, whichever the default is. It’s just that my experience is that most software is not already perfectly tuned and I’d much rather the default be more easily observable.

Look, it's likely we just come from different backgrounds. Most of my perf-sensitive work was optimizing inner loops with SIMD, allowing the compiler to inline hot functions, creating better data structures to make use of the CPU cache, etc. Frame pointer prologue overhead was measurable on most of our use-cases. I have a smaller amount of experience on profiling systems where calls trace across multiple processes, so maybe I haven't felt this pain enough. Though I still think the onus should be on teams to be able to comfortably recompile---not the world---but some part of it. After all, a lot of tuning can only be done through compile flags, such as turning off codepaths/capabilities which are unnecessary.

Makes sense.

I wasn't exaggerating about recompiling the world, though. Even if we say I'm only interested in profiling my application, a single library compiled without frame pointers makes useless any samples where code in that library was at the top of the stack. I've seen that be libc, openssl, some random Node module or JNI thing, etc. You can't just throw out those samples because they might still be your application's problem. For me in those situations, I would have needed to recompile most of the packages we got from both the OS distro and the supplemental package repo.

I think your viewpoint is valid.

My experience is on performance tuning the other side you mention. Cross-application, cross-library, whole-system, daemons, etc. Basically, "the whole OS as it's shipped to users".

For my case, I need the whole system setup correctly before it even starts to be useful. For your case, you only need the specific library or application compiled correctly. The rest of the system is negligible and probably not even used. Who would optimize SIMD routines next to function calls anyway?

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