Performance Evaluation and Monitoring
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Direct execution of C-string compiler texts
MICRO 12 Proceedings of the 12th annual workshop on Microprogramming
On balancing hardware-firmware for designing a fault-tolerant computers' series
MICRO 8 Proceedings of the 8th annual workshop on Microprogramming
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The problems of determining the relative frequency of execution of instructions on a computer and finding the occurrences of patterns of instructions within programs have been investigated by a number of researchers in the past. The method most often used was to examine the object code and apply a method to count each type of instruction or group that constitutes a given pattern. Except for cases where special hardware has been added to the machine to perform the searching and accounting, most results have been based on the evaluation of the object code for a program on an offline basis. In this paper, a method is presented which allows the user to gather information concerning frequency counts of instructions while the program is executing, and also allow the user to specify sequences of instructions to be examined. Besides the enhanced accuracy this method offers over static methods of counting, it is also much faster and can also be used to monitor the performance of operating system programs such as loaders, compilers and supervisor routines.