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Selective Path Profiling
Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering (PASTE 2002)
November 2002
T. Apiwattanapong and M.J. Harrold
Abstract
Recording dynamic information for only a subset of program entities
can reduce monitoring overhead and can facilitate efficient monitoring
of deployed software. Program entities, such as statements, can be
monitored using probes that track the execution of those entities.
Monitoring more complicated entities, such as paths or definition-use
associations, requires more sophisticated techniques that track not
only the execution of the desired entities but also the execution of
other entities with which they interact. This paper presents an
approach for monitoring subsets of one such program entity---acyclic
paths in procedures. Our selective path profiling algorithm computes
values for probes that guarantee that the sum of the assigned value
along each acyclic path (path sum) in the subset is unique; acyclic
paths not in the subset may or may not have unique path sums. The
paper also presents the results of studies that compare the number
of probes required for subsets of various sizes with the number of
probes required for profiling all paths, computed using Ball and
Larus' path profiling algorithm. Our results indicate that the
algorithm performs well on many procedures by requiring only a
small percentage of probes for monitoring the subset.
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