Build Performance

This page is intended to serve as a guide to tweaking your build system and bitbake configuration for optimal build time as well as to provide some guidance on how to collect build metrics and identify bottlenecks.

bb-matrix

The bb-matrix.sh script (scripts/contrib/bb-perf) can be used to collect all the relevant metrics of the TIME(1) command for a build. The bb-matrix.sh generates a datfile similar to the following (trimmed for display purposes):

BB PM %e %S %U %P %c %w %R %F %M
04 04 7584.13 3106.60 19818.78 302% 10038479 53837200 2381052920 52972 1857632
04 05 7488.93 3143.40 20344.21 313% 10290920 53308215 2380549395 51668 2027232
04 06 7524.69 3141.34 20575.58 315% 10287288 53626500 2380333579 51820 2027248
04 07 7464.62 3141.47 20741.94 319% 10613016 53459858 2381025909 50929 2027376
04 08 7570.45 3151.23 20949.85 318% 10625744 53485726 2382061127 52367 2027232
05 04 7479.95 3254.95 20444.40 316% 13858856 50054205 2387500546 53457 2027232
05 05 7494.82 3282.37 20643.16 319% 14274000 49852477 2380346993 52289 2027248
05 06 7432.55 3277.54 21049.68 327% 14340685 49998524 2380221845 53622 2027376
05 07 7377.66 3300.18 21238.96 332% 13926958 50634688 2384699997 53851 1941840
05 08 7408.57 3297.64 21306.12 332% 14139864 50330053 2380869210 54169 1912272

The bb-matrix-plot.sh script can then be used to visualize this data, generating images like the following: