Portable and accurate sampling profiling for Java

This article presents a novel framework for the sampling‐based profiling of Java programs, which relies on program transformation techniques. We exploit bytecode instruction counting to regularly activate a user‐defined profiling agent, which processes the current call stack. This approach has several advantages, such as making the instrumentation entirely portable, generating reproducible profiles, and enabling a fine‐grained adjustment of the sampling rate. Our framework offers a flexible API to write portable profiling agents in pure Java. While the overhead due to our profiling scheme is comparable to the overhead caused by prevailing, timing‐based profilers, the resulting profiles are much more accurate. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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