Accurate Profiling in the Presence of Dynamic Compilation

Abstract:

Many profilers based on bytecode instrumentation yield wrong results in the presence of an optimizing dynamic compiler, either due to not being aware of optimizations such as stack allocation and method inlining, or due to the inserted code disrupting such optimizations. To avoid such perturbations, we present a novel technique to make any profiler implemented at the bytecode level aware of optimizations performed by the dynamic compiler. We implement our approach in a state-of-the-art Java virtual machine and demonstrate its significance with concrete profilers. We quantify the impact of escape analysis on allocation profiling, object life-time analysis, and the impact of method inlining on callsite profiling. We illustrate how our approach enables new kinds of profilers, such as a profiler for non-inlined callsites, and a testing framework for locating performance bugs in dynamic compiler implementations.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{zheng_accurate_2015,
    title = {{Accurate Profiling in the Presence of Dynamic Compilation}},
    author = {Zheng, Yudi and Bulej, Lubomí r and Binder, Walter},
    year = {2015},
    booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications}},
    publisher = {ACM},
    series = {{OOPSLA 2015}},
    location = {New York, NY, USA},
    doi = {10.1145/2814270.2814281},
    isbn = {978-1-4503-3689-5},
    pages = {433--450},
    url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2814270.2814281},
}

Proceedings paper