Towards Logging Optimization for Dynamic Object Process Graph Construction

Logging the execution process of a program is a popular activity for practical program understanding. However, understanding the behavior of a program from a complete execution trace is difficult because a system may generate a substantial number of runtime events. To focus on a small subset of runtime events, a dynamic object process graph (DOPG) has been proposed. Although a DOPG can potentially facilitate program understanding, the logging process has not been adapted for DOPGs. If a developer is interested in the behavior of a particular object, only the runtime events related to the object are necessary to construct a DOPG. The vast majority of runtime events in a complete execution trace are irrelevant to the interesting object. This paper analyzes actual DOPGs and reports that a logging tool can be optimized to record only the runtime events related to a particular object specified by a developer. key words: dynamic analysis, logging, program understanding, dynamic object process graph