I am writing a calculation intensive program in C (Linux OS, specifically Fedora 11) and was wondering if there is a way to track cache hits/misses and page hits/misses?
And more generally I'm looking for a way to track anything that could be of use in analysis of performance on different machines, is there a way to do this in the C program itself or a utility already out there that can do this?
The sar and vmstat utilities come to mind; however since Linux is open source there probably are many interfaces to the kernel that can be invoked to get at that information. I only work in Unix but there are many Linux folks in this forum and I'm sure they can provide better answers.
If it supports your CPU, look at valgrind. Its cachegrind tool will do some of what you want. callgrind (an extended version of cachegrind) + the KCachegrind front end is an especially useful way to do profiling.
