ByCounter: Portable Runtime Counting of Bytecode Instructions and Method Invocations

For bytecode-based applications, runtime instruction counts can be used as a platform-independent application execution metric, and also can serve as the basis for bytecode-based performance prediction. However, dierent instruction types have dierent execution durations, so they must be counted separately, and method invocations should be identified and counted because of their substantial contribution to the total application performance. For Java bytecode, most JVMs and profilers do not provide such functionality at all, and existing bytecode analysis frameworks require expensive JVM instrumentation for instruction-level counting. In this paper, we present ByCounter, a lightweight approach for exact runtime counting of executed bytecode instructions and method invocations. ByCounter significantly reduces total counting costs by instrumenting only the application bytecode and not the JVM, and it can be used without modifications on any JVM. We evaluate the presented approach by successfully applying it to multiple Java applications on dierent JVMs, and discuss the runtime costs of applying ByCounter to these