Over last few years 64-bit x86 platform has became ubiquitous, thus making stupid memory limitations a thing of some forgotten past. 64-bit processors made internal memory structures bigger, but compensated that with twice the amount and twice larger registers.

But there’s one thing that definitely got worse – gcc, the compiler, has a change in default compilation options – it omits frame pointers from binaries in x86_64 architecture. People have advocated against that back in 1997 because of very simple reasons, that are still very much existing today too – frame pointers are needed for efficient stack trace calculations, and stack traces are very very useful, sometimes.

So, this change means that oprofile is not able to give hierarchical profiles, it also means that

In case anyone is interested in a copy of my slides for the two lightning talks I gave at the Open Source Days 2008 conference, I have made them available here:

• "Optimizing Large Databases Using InnoDB Clustered Indexes:" HTML and PDF.
• "Profiling with OProfile and Intel Core 2 performance counters:" HTML and PDF.

I waqs quite pleased with the benchmark that I prepared for the InnoDB mini-talk, where I measure the performance difference between clustered and auto_increment