Inferred call path profiling

Abstract

Prior work has found call path profiles to be useful for optimizers and programmer-productivity tools. Unfortunately, previous approaches for collecting path profiles are expensive: they need to either execute additional instructions (to track calls and returns) or they need to walk the stack. The state-of-the-art techniques for call path profiling slow down the program by 7% (for C programs) and 20% (for Java programs). This paper describes an innovative technique that collects minimal information from the running program and later (offline) infers the full call paths from this information.