A Brief Review of Code Profiling Techniques

Hashmat Ali, Graduation Student Saadat Abbasi, Graduation Student

MScs Student at Iqra University, Islamabad Pakistan MScs Student at Iqra University, Islamabad Pakistan
Email: hashmat32726@iqraisb.edu.pk Email: saadat31750@iqraisb.edu.pk
“This work was supported by Dr. Bilal Bashir (Senior fecality Member at Iqra university.”

ABSTRACT In this paper, we are going to present different profiling techniques that are used to overcome
the services delay issue in large applications. As Big data and cloud computing field are growing on and data
is available in huge amount the system needs high power to process this data, which leads to delay and latency
in services.to tackle these issues a system need to keep record of memory allocation and code optimization
and for this very purpose Profilers are used by the developers and systems in order to enhance the performance
of certain large applications. They facilitate the developers to concentrate on the code area which consume
more processor time. As foe as interactive applications are concerned such profilers are convenient as their
output does not depend on the response time of a particular program. They are also meant to keep in view
certain events related to the users. In this way they enable the developers to highlight the problems related to
service latency.

KEYWORDS Profiler, Latency, Garbage Collector, Memory allocation, Object, Instrumentation

I. INTRODUCTION latency in system interaction caused decline in work quality

High level languages are more human readable and easy to
code to but we are not able to predict their performance like
programmers maybe using the language not properly which
leads to run their program slower than expected and put more
load on processors.[3]Also, To save cost a datacenters profile
guided optimization has a huge potential. Hardware base
monitoring units enables profiling with small amount of
overhead and proved to be effective, but these hardware
features are not flexible and also buggy with limitations.
Profiling based on instrumentation can replace hardware
through more flexible information gathering.
[4] Service like credit-card fraud detection and target website
advertisement which rely on big data and these services are
latency sensitive which run on memory managed runtimes
like as the java virtual machine (JVM). However, as these
platforms suffer from high pauses and latency due to poor
memory management.
II. Surveyed Techniques
[5]A latency profiling approach, with the help of a solid
execution program called LILA, is utilized, and validated,
spanning from minor benchmarks towards the complex
applications related to the real world. Researches conducted
by various bodies have proved it significantly that there is a
strong connection between delayed responses of interactive
systems and the perceptions of the users. Results showed that
of human beings as their energy concentration and zeal for
work is being adversely affected by such delays, leaving
them angry and frustrated. So the main objective of our
profiler is to make the developers aware of such
complications in order to facilitate the user more effectively.
[2]a technique called feature specific profiling that can report
the cost of a code with respect to language structures.it will
help programmer to find costly feature of the language and
explain prototype for two language and work as a
performance debugging tool.
If a program run slow then programmers check for the time
cost of functions calls and statements and ranks all program
cost to identify the statement which are taking too long to
execute and replace these with proper statement to optimize
the code we call this actionable because it point to redundant
code and can be optimized with changes to program.
Programmer already have wide range of tools to improve
performance of the program. Profilers are the most used tool
to diagnose performance issues. Most of the profiler report
execution time, space and I/O requests and estimate cost on
bases of a program is static, per function definition or
dynamic like per HTTP request. Some profilers are Vertical
profiler which attempts to see through the use of high-level
language features, Singer and Kirkham’s profile, it assigns
costs to programmer annotated code regions, Listener
latency profiling, which reports high-latency operations and
many more.

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FSP is a new technique which supplement cost with language
specific features. This give a new perspective for the
program performance which give developers ability to
optimize their programs.it is useful for program which use
non-local costs and also useful for languages that allow
creation of new features such as c++, R. Feature specific
profiling can be implemented on any language which support
stack annotations and inspection. To implement on
languages which does not support stack annotations
language must be extended by adding stack annotations.
It takes little effort and more steps to implement feature
specific profile then the traditional profilers. Library authors
or developers must add support for their code.
Implementation is simple and just need few lines of code. It
cannot measure the language features that cannot show on
stack annotations.
[4] Latency sensitive platforms allocate objects next to each
other with very different lifetimes which leads to severe
memory fragmentation. This problem identified previously
but the current memory management methods are not suited
for large applications that holds massive amount of memory.
Existing solution can reduce pauses by different methods,
but all these solutions require programmer effort and
knowledge, access of source code, offline profiling to reduce
latency. Pauses in long application are mainly caused by
garbage collection algorithms due to copying object for
promotion and demotion. To reduce these copies, different
lifespan object should be placed at different places in
memory by this we can reduce the fragmentation. To
overcome these issues a new technique called Runtime
object lifetime profiler (ROLP) is introduced that profiles
code of an application at runtime and helps garbage
collection algorithms to place objects that has similar
lifespans next to each other to reduce overall fragmentation
and application latency.
[3]A technique called instant profiling was introduced which
uses dynamic binary translation. In this technique instead of
using instrumentation the entire execution, Instant profiling
regularly intersects the native execution and the
instrumented execution according to configurable sequence
length and frequency parameters. It further reduces the
latency of the original profiling processes by pre-populating
the software code cache.
A power full technique for runtime program examination and
for collecting profile data is called Dynamic Binary
Instrumentation. There are several dynamic binary
instrumentation systems which share similar internal
mechanisms. They intercept the execution of target
programs, instrument points of interest, put instrument code
in their software code cache, and execute it from the software
code. Where and what resources are described by users
through custom APIs.
The method operates by running instrumented profiling code
from a machine data buffer for only a limited period of
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profiling duration. The original binary runs natively without
any instrumentation for normal execution phases. Instant
profiling also avoided possible latency degradation during
the initial profiling phases by prepopulating the code cache.
Instant profiling balances the tradeoff between knowledge
and overheads. This balance can be controlled by two
parameters. The first parameter, length of profiling,
determines how long one step of profiling lasts. Longer
profile length provides more detail, but also higher
overheads. In addition, it is likely that end users may
experience transient latency loss during profiling processes.
Therefore, we restrict the length of profiling to a maximum
of a few milliseconds. The second parameter that affects
overhead profiling is the frequency of profiling.
[6] A technique was introduced related to profiling to
understand the memory access behavior of programs which
are specialized in using recursive data structure. This
particular technique is known as recursive data structure
profiling, which aims at reducing memory access latencies in
order to fulfil the need for aggressive data structure
optimization with increase in processor memory
performance gaps. This technique gives a more in-depth
view of a programmer’s memory accesses as it captures the
aggregated information related to an entire data structure
instance unlike other memory profiling techniques that only
aggregate the behavior of individual loads and stores. It
doesn’t require any high-level program representation for
collecting RDS profile and manages this function with time
overhead upon intensive and other benchmark suites. In
order to quantify the potential of RDS profiler a metric has
also been introduced which shows the stability of an RDS
instance. The stability of RDS instance makes it attractive to
data structure optimization as it does not undergo notable
recharges from the beginning towards the end. The technique
proposed in this particular paper is quite new and also termed
as shape profiling. It is quiet in finding the disjoint recursive
data structure instances in a performance without requiring
any type of information of art from any type of programmer.
It also helped to identify several characteristics of RDS being
in benchmarks, which were not a job of other profiling
techniques.
[1] It is a usual practice for Microsoft profiling tools to
quantify average performance of a program. Such tools
usually depend on a program’s control flow graph for
reporting results and their organizations. On the other hand,
performance predictability is also considered as significant
measure in interactive server application. In addition to that
particular measure it is also important to be kept in mind that
the concern of an end user is with that of the performance of
a semantically defined interval of implementation
specifically in high level applications that are based on event
base programming. A traditional profiler gets the
functionality prominent that is considered a difficult task that
is present there on the crucial path of a semantic interval.
Moreover, the conventional profilers are not that capable to
accommodate results for a semantic interval. They also look
the ability of performance variance to individual functions.
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To address all these issues a novel profiler termed as V
profiler, to point out the main sources of latency variance in
a semantic interval of any software system. It also indicates
the start and end of semantic intervals of interest provided a
source code of a software system and annotations related to
programmer. A new abstraction which is called “variance
tree” is used V profiler to evaluate the thread interleaving
and breaks down the variances and co-variances of the
functions in the source code. From the end of the interval to
its start the latency variance is accumulated along a
backward path of dependence relationships among threads
with minimum programming effort. In this way considerable
performance variance is being reduced.
III. Discussion & Analysis
With great advancments in cloud computing and big data
where systems has to process large amount of data and
handle services requests, with these advancement an issue is
also arising that is the latency in code or delay in services
due bad code or bad memory management.
In table 1 we have shown a basic comparison of different
profiling techniques that are available.
execution time for various functions recorded by the
software counters running on the host machine in the
profiling method by sampling the target processor's PC
during program execution at a regular interval. Compared to
simulation, this approach is considerably fast, since the
executable runs in the real world. These profiler's best
example is the GNU. But accuracy of this method is poor as
instrumentation code is added which leads to overhead.
1.2 Sampling: Software-based sampling technique that
potentially reduces Runtime overhead compared to
instrumentation code-based software profiling. Interrupt is
developed in this technique at a regular interval. Or a
function is written which samples the contents of the
program counter and other essential registers of the
processor are used to dynamically evaluate the execution
actions of the latter.
1.3 Simulation: Simulators provide correct profiling
information and are nonintrusive as compared to other
software-based techniques. The main advantage of
simulation is the data can be tracked by designer from
internal register of processor. Simulation is performed on
host machine by instruction set simulation (ISS) model of the
target architecture.

Performance 2. Hardware based profiling

References

annotation

dependent

Overhead To overcome the limitations of software-based profiling

Language

Dynamic
Runtime

Stack

technique, scientist have to explore many hardware base

Medium

profiling methods e.g. JTAG interface, Trace/Debug

High
Low

interface and Logic analyzer.

Analyzer does not suit current complex SoCs which prohibit
direct access to the instruction bus of a processor. JTAG is
[1] X X X ✓ ●
useful for testing, authentication and debugging; however, it
[2] X ✓ X ✓ ●
is expensive to profile an application because it requires
[3] ✓ X X ✓ ● substantial overhead runtime and affects the application's
execution behavior. To profile the program code, tracked
[4] ✓ X ✓ ✓ ●
data is processed with host machine. But processing data in
[5] X ✓ ✓ X ● real time requires more efficient host CPU compared to
[6] ✓ X ✓ ✓ ● profiling the system.
Table 1
(Synthesis Matrix of Discussed techniques) There are several methods & techniques used in profiling or
used to create profilers.
There are two major classes available of profiling I. Instrumentation: Instrumentation means to instrument
1. Software based profiling the code related to the dispatching of event and of calls of
2. Hardware based profiling listeners. For this purpose, all call sites are instrumented, and
it is estimated that how much time is being consumed in
1. Software based profiling order to handle such events outside the java listeners. The
Software based profiling is the most widely used and insertion of instruments is aimed at calling a static method of
common profiling technique that is written in programming a class that is responsible for performing all actions. Manual
language. There are three types of software-based profiling. instrumentation of event dispatch, automatic instrumentation
I. Insertion of Instrumentation Code, II. Sampling, III. Cycle of listener calls, automatic instrumentation of paint calls and
accurate simulation automatic instrumentation of native calls are the activities to
1.1 Insertion of Instrumentation Code: Instrumentation be carried out during instrumentation.
done at the source code level, the assembly code level or the II. Execution: After running the application through the
binary level. This method modifies the initial code by adding process of instrumentation it has to be make sure that our
a certain code relevant to the profiling. This changed code profiler must be thread safe to keep track of Information
would be run on the target device or on the host computer. between profile notifications supported by java. Listener
Instrumentation code help to collect data of profiling. The

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latency basically intends at identifying three type of calls and
allowing the listeners to have high latency of higher ms.
III. Dynamic Binary Instrumentation: This is a very
powerful technique for introspection of a runtime program
and for collecting profile data for profile guided
optimization. There are many dynamic binary systems
available, they Intercept application execution and place
instrumented code in software cache code and execute this
code through software cache. Main benefit of this at runtime
is complete picture of program including plugin libraries and
dynamically generated code is available.
IV. Trace Analysis: Here a trace is converted into a
cumulative latency distribution and a listener latency profile.
Latency of all invocations related are shown here. Trace is
being analyzed simply by subtracting the time stamp of the
listener. This is a straightforward and simple adoption of
traditional call profilers showing the exclusive and inclusive
time spend.
Trace analysis runs in four perspectives.
1. Model phase injection
2. Cumulative latency distribution
3. Listener latency distribution
4. Listener latency profile
V. Java GUI toolkits: SWING and SET are two main
powerful java GUI toolkits, between whom the developers
are usually at a dilemma about which one is to be given
preference. In order to remove this discrepancy, and to make
these two GUI toolkits more useful, focuses on making
available a powerful latency approach. So, this particular
section aims at finding the differences between SWING and
SWT which may impact the said profiling approach in
different ways. It is important to identify the common aspects
that these two may share. Apart from commonalities there
are certain differences which are important to consider.
An other area that needs to be address is create neural
network based libraries that can be trained to help in increase
the profilers capacity.
V. References
[1] B. M. a. T. F. W. Jiamin Huang, "Statistical Analysis
of Latency Through Semantic Profiling," the Twelfth
European Conference on Computer Systems, 2017.
[2] V. S.-A. J. V. a. M. F. Leif Andersen, "Feature-
Specific Profiling," ACM Trans, 2019.
[3] T. M. R. H. D. B. a. S. M. H. K. Cho, "Instant
Profiling: Instrumentation Sampling for Profiling
Datacenter Applications," IEEE/ACM International
Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization,
2013.
[4] D. P. J. S. L. V. a. P. F. Rodrigo Bruno, "Runtime
Object Lifetime Profiler for Latency Sensitive Big
Data Applications," the Fourteenth EuroSys
Conference.
[5] M. H. Milan Jovic ∗, "Listener latency profiling:
Measuring the perceptible performance of interactive
Java applications," Science of Computer
Programming, 2009.
[6] E. R. a. D. I, "Recursive Data Structure Profiling,"
workshop on Memory system performance.

Most of the discussed techniques are beneficial and had a

great performance impact, also reduces programming
efforts, and save system resources. Can handle dynamic
workload however each one of these techniques somehow
has performance overhead which needs to be reduced as
latency intolerant system cannot bear that overhead.

IV. Conclusion and Future work

We have disscussed various profiling techniques in this
paper. Latecny and delay in services in big data and cloud
computing is the biggest challenge, all the techniques
disscussed in this paper has the ability to over come this issue
but these techniques also has limitation and need some
improvement. This paper can be helpful to scientist and
researcher who want to find a suitable profilling technique
for their research applications. This survey may also open
new directions for research as it discuss the profiling
techniques in details. An attemp is made through this survey
to disscuss the profiling techniques addressed by different
author in domain of code profiling in recent years.
Special attention should be paid to designing embedded OS-
based or multitasking profilers computer Software.

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