Tuning backfired? not (always) your fault: understanding and detecting configuration-related performance bugs

Abstract

Performance bugs (PBugs) are often hard to detect due to their non fail-stop symptoms. Existing debugging techniques can only detect PBugs with known patterns (e.g. inefficient loops). The key reason behind this incapability is the lack of a general test oracle. Here, we argue that the configuration tuning can serve as a strong candidate for PBugs detection. First, prior work shows that most performance bugs are related to configurations. Second, the tuning reflects users’ expectation of performance changes. If the actual performance behaves differently from the users’ intuition, the related code segment is likely to be problematic.