查看文章

Design and implementation defects that lead to inefficient computation widely exist in software. These defects are difficult to avoid and discover. They lead to severe performance degradation and energy waste during production runs, and are becoming increasingly critical with the meager increase of single-core hardware performance and the increasing concerns about energy constraints. Effective tools that diagnose performance problems and point out the inefficiency root cause are sorely needed.

The state of the art of performance diagnosis is preliminary. Profiling can identify the functions that consume the most computation resources, but can neither identify the ones that waste the most resources nor explain why. Performance-bug detectors can identify specific type of inefficient computation, but are not suited for diagnosing general performance problems. Effective failure diagnosis techniques, such as …