TraceAnalyzer: A system for processing performance traces

The performance of a program often varies significantly over the course of the program's run. Thus, to understand the performance of a program it is valuable to look not just at end-to-end metrics (e.g. total number of cache misses) but also the time-varying performance of the program. Unfortunately, analyzing time-varying performance is both cumbersome and difficult. This paper makes three contributions, all geared toward helping others in working with traces. First, it describes a system, the TraceAnalyzer, designed specifically for working with performance traces; a performance trace captures the time-varying performance of a program run. Second, it describes lessons that we have learned from many years of working with these traces. Finally, it uses a case study to demonstrate how we have used the TraceAnalyzer to understand a performance anomaly. © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.