Abstract Execution in a Multi-Tasking Environment

Abstract

Tracing software execution is an important part of understanding system performance. Raw CPU power has been increasing at a rate far greater than memory and I/O bandwidth, with the result that the performance of client/server and I/O-bound applications is not scaling as one might hope. Unfortunately, the behavior of these types of applications is particularly sensitive to the kinds of distortion induced by traditional tracing methods, so that current traces are either incomplete or of questionable accuracy. Abstract execution is a powerful tracing technique which was invented to speed the tracing of single processes and to store trace data more compactly. In this work, abstract execution was extended to trace multi-tasking workloads. The resulting system is more than 5 times faster than other current methods of gathering multi-tasking traces, and can therefore generate traces with far less time distortion.