perf complains losting events

From: Han Pingtian
Date: Wed Aug 03 2011 - 06:29:17 EST


Hi,

I find there is a comment about losting events:

/*
* The kernel collects the number of events it couldn't send in a stretch and
* when possible sends this number in a PERF_RECORD_LOST event. The number of
* such "chunks" of lost events is stored in .nr_events[PERF_EVENT_LOST] while
* total_lost tells exactly how many events the kernel in fact lost, i.e. it is
* the sum of all struct lost_event.lost fields reported.
*
* The total_period is needed because by default auto-freq is used, so
* multipling nr_events[PERF_EVENT_SAMPLE] by a frequency isn't possible to get
* the total number of low level events, it is necessary to to sum all struct
* sample_event.period and stash the result in total_period.
*/

So my question is, whether the losting of events is a problem?
I have saw it many times:

[root@hp-dl580g7-01 perf]# ./perf kmem record sleep 1
[ perf record: Woken up 0 times to write data ]
[ perf record: Captured and wrote 21.789 MB perf.data (~951977 samples)
]
Processed 0 events and LOST 76148!

Check IO/CPU overload!

[root@hp-dl580g7-01 perf]# ./perf kmem stat
Processed 0 events and LOST 76148!

Check IO/CPU overload!


SUMMARY
=======
Total bytes requested: 5725028
Total bytes allocated: 6291512
Total bytes wasted on internal fragmentation: 566484
Internal fragmentation: 9.003941%
Cross CPU allocations: 28/84295

--
Han Pingtian
Quality Engineer
hpt @ #kernel-qe
Red Hat, Inc
Freedom ... courage ... Commitment ... ACCOUNTABILITY
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