armtime -- ARMed time command

The armtime tool is used for instrumenting and measuring programs and shell scripts without modifying the source code. Its called with the program and its arguments as arguments to the armtime command itself. It will register application and transaction meta data with the ARM library, start the ARM application and transaction instances using standard API calls and then call the given program. After the program terminates it stops both ARM transaction and application instances and will exit.

One most advantage of this approach is that it can be used for a huge variety of existing applications. Another advantage of using armtime is that it can make use of ARM correlator and properties:

Correlation

If a program which was started using armtime in turn starts another program using armtime these measurements are correlated using the standard ARM correlator mechanism resulting in a measurement chain of started programs.

Properties

Program parameters often influence the behaviour of program execution. To better understand the response time measurement of an armtime command the command line arguments can be associated to the measurement using standard ARM properties.

Command line options

Usage:

armtime [options] command [command arguments]

Options

-h, --help

prints help page.

-a name, --app name

specifies that name should be used as the ARM application name instead of armtime.

-f code, --fail code

specifies that code or higher is the return code to mark a command be failed.

-g string, --group string

provide application group used for starting the ARM application.

-i string, --instance string

provide application instance used for starting the ARM application.

-l libname, --lib-arm4 libname

specifies libname as the ARM4 library to be loaded and used. Note libname can either be the base name of the library or the complete library name including suffix like .so.

-p, --prop-arg

indicates that command arguments should be associated to the transaction measurement as ARM properties.

-P, --prop-args

indicates that command arguments should be associated to the transaction as multiple context values.

-t name, --tran name

specifies that name should be used as the ARM transaction name instead of command name passed.

-u user, --user user

provide an user name to be associated with the ARM transaction.