Development of instruction tracer for performance evaluation

Abstract

AbstractApplications such as network server programs and distributed multimedia applications, in which system calls and input/output processing are frequently used, are highly dependent on the operating system. In evaluating the performance of such applications, the execution data for the application and the operating system must be acquired consistently. Conventionally, the performance of a program has mostly been examined through the occurrences of particular events, by means of the performance monitoring function provided by the CPU. The most frequent is the measurement of time based on the cumulative number of clocks in the CPU. In the present computer environment, these values vary depending on the measurement timing. In addition, in these methods, the information concerning the time of occurrence is not preserved when multiple events occur, and there is no means of analyzing the dependency among the events. It is thus difficult for the user to locate the reason for the variation of the value. In order to solve these problems, this paper considers memory access as the measure for performance evaluation. The “SURU” kernel level instruction tracer, the set of “SURU tools” that analyze the output data from TSURU, and the “SURU library” used to construct TSURU tools, are proposed. TSURU can acquire dynamic information such as the execution instruction sequence, the refer address, and the interrupt. Using the TSURU tools to analyze the data acquired by TSURU, the operation of the program under consideration can be traced, and the execution time and the page fault generation rate can be determined. Based on this result, the factors responsible for performance degradation can be analyzed, and the performance improvement obtainable by solving the problem can be estimated. With the TSURU library, the user can easily construct TSURU tools. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 87(12): 73–83, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20131