A Framework for Reducing the Cost of Instrumented Code

Abstract

Instrumenting code to collect profiling information can cause substantial execution overhead. This overhead makes instrumentation difficult to perform at runtime, often preventing many known offline feedback-directed optimizations from being used in online systems. This paper presents a general framework for performing instrumentation sampling to reduce the overhead of previously expensive instrumentation. The framework is simple and effective, using code-duplication and counter-based sampling to allow switching between instrumented and non-instrumented code.