OLPC tuning thoughts

[William Cohen]

Hi All,

The OLPC is a very resource limited machine. Decreasing resource use on the OLPC 
translates into very tangible benefits such as more space on machine for user 
content, better system responsiveness, better better battery life. I have been 
adding material to http://wiki.laptop.org on the experience of using tools on 
OLPC machine and software when possible. There are two broad categories been 
looking at: memory use and processor use.

Processor Utilization tools:
	-sysprof (haven't personally tried this)
	-OProfile (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Oprofile_setup)
	-Python profiling (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Python_profiling)
	-SystemTap (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Systemtap)
		(http://www.mail-archive.com/devel@laptop.org/msg03436.html)
	-Valgrind's callgrind tool to get call graph information
		(http://www.valgrind.org/)

Storage Utilization
	-Valgrind's massif tool to examine memory allocation
		(http://www.valgrind.org/)
	-reducing size of code (http://lovesunix.net/spaceoptimization.pdf)
	-Improving shared libraries
		(http://people.redhat.com/drepper/dsohowto.pdf)
	-scripts to analyze file system and process memory use.
		(http://people.redhat.com/berrange/olpc/image/)
	-scripts to analyze process memory map
		(http://people.redhat.com/berrange/olpc/performance/)

Looking through the wiki pages there currently wasn't a nice clearing house of 
this type of information so that people can quickly get up to speed on how they 
might tune code on the machine. I decided to add one:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Performance_tuning

Any commments or additions to it would be appreciated.

-Will