ecstats(1)

NAME
     ecstats - report global event counter activity

SYNOPSIS
     ecstats [-aCDefr] [-s samples] [interval]

DESCRIPTION
     ecstats may be used on systems with R1x000 processors to interrogate the
     global event counters maintained by IRIX using the underlying hardware
     event counter mechanisms.  The global event counters are maintained on a
     system-wide basis, aggregated over all processes and for all user and
     system mode execution.

     Global event counters are enabled and disabled using the ecadmin(1)
     command.

     The options to ecstats are as follows;

     -a   Report absolute values for the event counters (the complement of
          -r).

     -C   Enable full-screen and continuous update mode.  Single character
          keystroke commands have the effect of toggling the command line
          options, i.e.

          a    change to reporting absolute counter values
          e    report only the enabled counters
          f    display both enabled and disabled counters
          r    change to reporting counter rates
          q    exit
          ^L   redraw the display

     -D   Enable some diagnostic output, not useful with -C.

     -e   Display only those event counters that have been enabled - this is
          the default.

     -f   Display both enabled and disabled event counters (the complement of
          -e).

     -r   Display event rates - this is the default.

     -s   Report data for samples intervals and then exit.  The default is to
          run forever.

     New information is reported each interval seconds.  The default is 5
     seconds.

     For a particular processor implementation, the number of physical
     hardware counters may be smaller than the number of event counters that
     have been enabled.  When this occurs, the IRIX kernel multiplexes the
     physical hardware counters amongst the enabled event counters, and
     ecstats scales up the observed counts to reflect the level of
     multiplexing.  If this scaling has taken place, the reported counters may
     be subject to some statistical sampling errors, and the values are shown
     with a ``*'' annotation.

     For systems with processors of mixed type (particularly R10000 and
     R12000/R14000) some events have different semantics on different
     processor types, refer to the -M and -T flags for ecadmin(1).  If any
     events in this category are enabled, then the values reported by ecstats
     are shown with a ``?''  annotation.

CAVEAT
     The underlying hardware event counters are a finite resource, to be
     shared amongst multiple competing uses.  ecstats is one such use that
     requires the use of ecadmin(1) to enable at least one global event
     counter.

     Once any global event counters have been enabled with ecadmin(1), then
     any future attempts to use either perfex(1) or the counter-based
     SpeedShop profiling tools will be unsuccessful, until all global event
     counters are released.

SEE ALSO
     ecadmin(1), perfex(1), pminfo(1), speedshop(1) and r10k_counters(5).

     The specifications for the R10000 event counters may be found at
     http://www.sgi.com/processors/r10k/performance.html