Performance debugging in the large via mining millions of stack traces

Abstract

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 2010, StackMine has been applied in performance-debugging activities at a Microsoft team for performance analysis, especially for a large number of execution traces. Based on real-adoption experiences of StackMine in practice, we conducted an evaluation of StackMine on performance debugging in the large for Microsoft Windows 7. We also conducted another evaluation on a third-party application. The results highlight substantial benefits offered by StackMine in performance debugging in the large for large-scale software systems.