Preferential Path Profiling

PPP is a novel scheme for efficiently profiling paths in programs. PPP enables path profiling at extremely low overheads by observing that most consumers of path profiles are usually interested in profiling a small number of paths that are known a priori, even though the number of potential paths in functions can be quite large. PPP uses a form of arithmetic coding to compactly encode these interesting paths, which reduces the runtime overheads of tracking paths. PPP has been demonstrated to be extremely efficient, even for large, memory intensive applications and in cost-sensitive environments such as residual path profiling, where the costs of profiling have traditionally precluded the use of path profiles.

People Involved

• Kapil Vaswani
• Aditya V. Nori
• Trishul M. Chilimbi

Papers

Presentations

• Preferential Path Profiling: Compactly Numbering Interesting Paths (POPL 2007)