research-article

Evaluating the accuracy of Java profilers

Authors:

Todd Mytkowicz,

Matthias Hauswirth,

Peter F. SweeneyAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 45, Issue 6

Pages 187 - 197

https://doi.org/10.1145/1809028.1806618

Published: 05 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Performance analysts profile their programs to find methods that are worth optimizing: the "hot" methods. This paper shows that four commonly-used Java profilers (xprof, hprof, jprofile, and yourkit) often disagree on the identity of the hot methods. If two profilers disagree, at least one must be incorrect. Thus, there is a good chance that a profiler will mislead a performance analyst into wasting time optimizing a cold method with little or no performance improvement.

This paper uses causality analysis to evaluate profilers and to gain insight into the source of their incorrectness. It shows that these profilers all violate a fundamental requirement for sampling based profilers: to be correct, a sampling-based profilermust collect samples randomly.

We show that a proof-of-concept profiler, which collects samples randomly, does not suffer from the above problems. Specifically, we show, using a number of case studies, that our profiler correctly identifies methods that are important to optimize; in some cases other profilers report that these methods are cold and thus not worth optimizing.

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Cited By

Vukasovic MProkopec A(2023)Exploiting Partially Context-sensitive Profiles to Improve Performance of Hot CodeACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/361293745:4(1-64)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3612937
Trubiani CPinciroli RBiaggi AFontana F(2023)Automated Detection of Software Performance Antipatterns in Java-Based ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.323432149:4(2873-2891)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3234321
Moseler OKreber LDiehl S(2022)The ThreadRadar visualization for debugging concurrent Java programsJournal of Visualization10.1007/s12650-022-00843-w25:6(1267-1289)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s12650-022-00843-w
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Evaluating the accuracy of Java profilers
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Measurement
    2. Metrics

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 45, Issue 6

PLDI '10

June 2010

496 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/1809028

Issue’s Table of Contents

PLDI '10: Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
June 2010
514 pages
ISBN:9781450300193
DOI:10.1145/1806596
General Chair:
Ben Zorn
Microsoft Research
,
Program Chair:
Alex Aiken
Stanford University

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 05 June 2010

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 45, Issue 6

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Cited By

Vukasovic MProkopec A(2023)Exploiting Partially Context-sensitive Profiles to Improve Performance of Hot CodeACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/361293745:4(1-64)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3612937
Trubiani CPinciroli RBiaggi AFontana F(2023)Automated Detection of Software Performance Antipatterns in Java-Based ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.323432149:4(2873-2891)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3234321
Moseler OKreber LDiehl S(2022)The ThreadRadar visualization for debugging concurrent Java programsJournal of Visualization10.1007/s12650-022-00843-w25:6(1267-1289)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s12650-022-00843-w
Weber MApel SSiegmund N(2021)White-Box Performance-Influence ModelsProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00099(1059-1071)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00099
Rosà ARosales EBinder W(2019)Analysis and Optimization of Task Granularity on the Java Virtual MachineACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/333849741:3(1-47)Online publication date: 16-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3338497
Xu HWang QSong SJohn LLiu XEigenmann RDing CMcKee S(2019)Can we trust profiling results?Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Supercomputing10.1145/3330345.3330371(284-295)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3330345.3330371
Wang FShi XLu XLima SRocha Á(2018)A low-overhead and efficient Java object profiler on ART virtual machineJournal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems: Applications in Engineering and Technology10.3233/JIFS-16965535:3(2997-3009)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.3233/JIFS-169655
Jiang MWang CLuo XMiu MChen T(2017)Characterizing the Impacts of Application Layer DDoS Attacks2017 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS)10.1109/ICWS.2017.58(500-507)Online publication date: Jun-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICWS.2017.58
St-Amour VAndersen LFelleisen M(2015)Feature-Specific ProfilingCompiler Construction10.1007/978-3-662-46663-6_3(49-68)Online publication date: 2015
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46663-6_3
Beck FMoseler ODiehl SRey G(2013)In situ understanding of performance bottlenecks through visually augmented code2013 21st International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)10.1109/ICPC.2013.6613834(63-72)Online publication date: May-2013
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC.2013.6613834
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