a framework for reducing the cost of instrumented code
Instrumenting code to collect profiling information can cause substantial execution overhead. This overhead makes instrumentation difficult to perform at runtime, often preventing many known offline feedback-directed optimizations from being used in online systems. This paper presents a general framework for performing instrumentation sampling to reduce the overhead of previously expensive instrumentation. The framework is simple and effective, using code-duplication and counter-based sampling to allow switching between instrumented and non-instrumented code. Our framework does not rely on any hardware or operating system support, yet provides a high frequency sample rate that is tunable, allowing the tradeoff between overhead and accuracy to be adjusted easily at runtime. Experimental results are presented to validate that our technique can collect accurate profiles (93-98\% overlap with a perfect profile) with low overhead (averaging 6\% total overhead with a naive implementation). A Jalape~ no-specific optimization is also presented that reduces overhead further, resulting in an average total overhead of 3\%.
cost instrument code collect profiles informal runtime optimality online systems paper general sampling effect switch hardware operating system support accuracy experimentation implementation  framework  direct feedback