A measure of program locality and its application

Although the phenomenon of locality has long been recognized as the single most important characteristic of program behaviour, relatively little work has been done in attempting to measure it. Recent work has led to the development of an intrinsic measure of program locality based on the Bradford-Zipf distribution. Potential applications for such a measure are many, and include the evaluation of program restructuring methods (manual and automatic), the prediction of system performance, the validation of program behaviour models, and the enhanced understanding of the phenomena that characterize program behaviour. A consideration of each of these areas is given in connection with the proposed measure, both to increase confidence in the validity of the measure and to illustrate a methodology for dealing with such problems.