Probe Distribution Techniques to Profile Events in Deployed Software

Abstract

Profiling deployed software provides valuable insights for quality improvement activities. The probes required for profiling, however, can cause an unacceptable performance overhead for users. In previous work we have shown that significant overhead reduction can be achieved, with limited information loss, through the distribution of probes across deployed instances. However, existing techniques for probe distribution are designed to profile simple events. In this paper we present a set of techniques for probe distribution to enable the profiling of complex events that require multiple probes and that share probes with other events. Our evaluation of the new techniques indicates that, for tight overhead bounds, techniques that produce a balanced event allocation can retain significantly more field information