Performance debugging in the large via mining millions of stack traces

—Given limited resource and time before software release, development-site testing and debugging become more and more insufficient to ensure satisfactory software performance. As a counterpart for debugging in the large pioneered by the Microsoft Windows Error Reporting (WER) system focusing on crashing/hanging bugs, performance debugging in the large has emerged thanks to available infrastructure support to collect execution traces with performance issues from a huge number of users at the deployment sites. However, performance debugging against these numerous and complex traces remains a significant challenge for performance analysts. In this paper, to enable performance debugging in the large in practice, we propose a novel approach, called StackMine, that mines callstack traces to help performance analysts effectively discover highly impactful performance bugs (e.g., bugs impacting many users with long response delay). As a successful technology-transfer effort, since December 20...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Shi Han, Yingnong Dang, Song Ge, Dongmei Zhang, Tao Xie
• Keywords: Adoption Experiences, Execution Traces, ICSE 2012, Large Scale Software, Software Engineering