TABLE OF CONTENTS Where performance is measured, performance improves. Where performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates.
Thomas S. Monson
This chapter is devoted to the Intel IXP2XXX Product Line Architecture Tool (AT). AT is a performance analysis tool that enables a more detailed and automated performance analysis of an IXP data plane application. You can use AT throughout the software development lifecycle of the application starting from design, through code development and performance tuning phases.
The back-of-the-envelope method of calculating performance metrics presented in Chapter 8 is a manual and time-consuming way to do performance analysis for IXP network processor applications. Intel has developed a tool specifically designed for IXP performance analysis called the IXP2XXX Product Line Architecture Tool (AT). AT has been developed as a plug-in for Eclipse. Figure 9.1 shows the AT perspective within Eclipse. This section presents AT and shows how you can use it to expedite performance analysis. It also describes the AT analysis technique and shows how AT overcomes several limitations of the back-of-the-envelope performance analysis technique.
AT has been specifically designed to enable you to quickly analyze the performance of an application. It presents a GUI front end for specifying application code, data structures, and critical paths. AT expedites performance analysis in several ways:
By incorporating detailed knowledge of various link-layer protocols and line speeds, AT automates the calculation of packet rates given...
