Optimize application performance with CPU affinity
Introduction
Understand thread pinning and CPU affinity
Create a CPU-intensive program
Pin threads to cores with taskset
Set CPU affinity in source code
Next Steps
Optimize application performance with CPU affinity
Who is this for?
This is an advanced topic for developers, performance engineers, and system administrators looking to fine-tune the performance of their workload on many-core Arm-based systems.
What will you learn?
Upon completion of this Learning Path, you will be able to:
- Pin threads to specific CPU cores using taskset and source code modifications
- Measure cache performance improvements from thread pinning using perf
- Evaluate performance trade-offs between throughput and latency consistency
- Implement CPU affinity strategies for co-located workloads
Prerequisites
Before starting, you will need the following:
- An Arm Linux system with four or more CPU cores
- Experience with multi-threaded programming in C++ and Python
- Understanding of build systems and computer architecture concepts
- Familiarity with Linux command-line tools