Dynamic Instrumentation of Threaded Applications

The use of threads is becoming commonplace in both sequential and parallel programs. This paper describes our design and initial experience with non-trace based performance instrumentation techniques for threaded programs. Our goal is to provide detailed performance data while maintaining control of instrumentation costs. We have extended Paradyn’s dynamic instrumentation (which can instrument programs without recompiling or relinking) to handle threaded programs. Controlling instrumentation costs means efficient instrumentation code and avoiding locks in the instrumentation. Our design is based on low contention data structures. To associate performance data with individual threads, we have all threads share the same instrumentation code and assign each thread with its own private copy of performance counters or timers. The asynchrony in a threaded program poses a major challenge to dynamic instrumentation. To implement time-based metrics on a per-thread basis, we need to instrume...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Zhichen Xu, Barton P. Miller, Oscar Naim
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Instrumentation, Instrumentation Code, Instrumentation Costs, PPOPP 1999