Paper Info
Title
Toddler: detecting performance problems via similar memory-access patterns
Abstract
Performance bugs are programming errors that create significant performance degradation. While developers often use automated oracles for detecting functional bugs, detecting performance bugs usually requires time-consuming, manual analysis of execution profiles. The human effort for performance analysis limits the number of performance tests analyzed and enables performance bugs to easily escape to production. Unfortunately, while profilers can successfully localize slow executing code, profilers cannot be effectively used as automated oracles. This paper presents TODDLER, a novel automated oracle for performance bugs, which enables testing for performance bugs to use the well established and automated process of testing for functional bugs. TODDLER reports code loops whose computation has repetitive and partially similar memory-access patterns across loop iterations. Such repetitive work is likely unnecessary and can be done faster. We implement TODDLER for Java and evaluate it on 9 popular Java codebases. Our experiments with 11 previously known, real-world performance bugs show that TODDLER finds these bugs with a higher accuracy than the standard Java profiler. Using TODDLER, we also found 42 new bugs in six Java projects: Ant, Google Core Libraries, JUnit, Apache Collections, JDK, and JFreeChart. Based on our bug reports, developers so far fixed 10 bugs and confirmed 6 more as real bugs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/ICSE.2013.6606602
Software Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
significant performance degradation,performance analysis,performance problem,novel automated oracle,real-world performance bug,performance test,similar memory-access pattern,performance bug,automated oracle,java project,automated process,functional bug,data structures,pediatrics,testing,computer bugs,java
Programming language,Computer science,Toddler,Software bug,Oracle,Real-time computing,Bebugging,Program testing,Java,Operating system,Debugging
Conference
Volume
ISBN
Citations 
2
978-1-4673-3073-2
64
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.50
23
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Adrian Nistor11745.85
Linhai Song230013.98
Darko Marinov32502126.52
Shan Lu4177982.48