Bursty Tracing: A Framework for Low-Overhead Temporal Profiling

With processor speed increasing much more rapidly than memory access speed, memory system optimizations have the potential to significantly improve program performance. Unfortunately, cache-level optimizations often require detailed temporal information about a program’s references to be effective. Traditional techniques for obtaining this information are too expensive to be practical in an on-line setting. We address this problem by describing and evaluating a framework for low-overhead temporal profiling. Our framework extends the Arnold-Ryder framework that uses instrumentation and counter-based sampling to collect frequency profiles with low overhead. Our framework samples bursts (sub-sequences) of the trace of all runtime events to construct a temporal program profile. Our bursty tracing profiler is built using Vulcan, an executable-editing tool for x86, and we evaluate it on optimized x86 binaries. Like the Arnold-Ryder framework, we have the advantages of not requiring operating system or hardware support and being deterministic. Unlike them, we are not limited to capturing temporal relationships on intraprocedural acyclic paths since our trace bursts can span procedure boundaries. In addition, our framework does not require access to program source or recompilation. A direct implementation of our extensions to the Arnold-Ryder framework results in profiling overhead of 6-35%. We describe techniques that reduce this overhead to 3-18%, making it suitable for use in an on-line setting.