Online Subpath Profiling

We present an efficient online subpath profiling algorithm, OSP, that reports hot subpaths executed by a program in a given run. The hot subpaths can start at arbitrary basic block boundaries, and their identification is important for code optimization; e.g., to locate program traces in which optimizations could be most fruitful, and to help programmers in identifying performance bottlenecks.The OSP algorithm is online in the sense that it reports at any point during execution the hot subpaths as observed so far. It has very low memory and runtime overheads, and exhibits high accuracy in reports for benchmarks such as Mex and FFT. These features make the OSP algorithm potentially attractive for use in just-in-time (JIT) optimizing compilers, in which profiling performance is crucial and it is useful to locate hot subpaths as early as possible.The OSP algorithm is based on an adaptive sampling technique that makes effective utilization of memory with small overhead. Both memory and runtime overheads can be controlled, and the OSP algorithm can therefore be used for arbitrarily large applications, realizing a tradeoff between report accuracy and performance.We have implemented a Java prototype of the OSP algorithm for Java programs. The implementation was tested on programs from the Java Grande benchmark suite and exhibited a low average runtime overhead.