Data Sharing

Metric Description

Data shared by multiple threads (even just read shared) may cause increased access latency due to cache coherency. This metric measures the impact of that coherency. Excessive data sharing can drastically harm multithreaded performance. This metric is defined by the ratio of cycles while the caching system is handling shared data to all cycles. It does not measure waits due to contention on a variable, which is measured by the Locks and Waits analysis.

Possible Issues

Significant data sharing by different cores is detected.

Tips

1. Examine the Contested Accesses metric to determine whether the major component of data sharing is due to contested accesses or simple read sharing. Read sharing is a lower priority than Contested Accesses or issues such as LLC Misses and Remote Accesses.

2. If simple read sharing is a performance bottleneck, consider changing data layout across threads or rearranging computation. However, this type of tuning may not be straightforward and could bring more serious performance issues back.