Profiling tools (also known as profilers) play an important role in understanding program performance at runtime, such as hotspots, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies. While profilers have been proven to be useful, they give extra burden to software engineers. Software engineers, as the users, are responsible to interpret the complex performance data and identify actionable optimization in program source code. However, it can be challenging for users to associate inefficiencies with the program semantics, especially if the users are not the authors of the code, which limits the applicability of profilers. In this thesis, we explore a new direction to combine performance profiles and program semantics with a deep learning approach. The key idea is to glean code summary for semantic information (at a certain level) and integrate it into a profiler, which can better understand program inefficiencies for actionable optimization. To be concrete, we combine profiles generated by Async Profiler (the state-of-the-art Java profiler) with code summarization from a fine-tuned CodeBERT-based model. We demonstrate the code summaries of any selected call path in a graphic user interface. Our system can effectively assist analysis on many Java benchmarks.

Flame graphs are a popular way of representing profiling data. In this paper we propose a possible mathematical definition of flame graphs. In doing so, we gain some interesting algebraic properties almost for free, which in turn allow us to define some operations that can allow to perform an in-depth performance regression analysis. The typical documented use of a flame graph is via its graphical representation, whereby one scans the picture for the largest plateaux. Whilst this method is effective at finding the main sources of performance issues, it leaves quite a large amount of data potentially unused. By combining a mathematical precise definition of flame graphs with some statistical methods we show how to generalise this visual procedure and make the best of the full set of collected profiling data.

This is a guest post by the Jira Cloud Performance Team at Atlassian. In their own words, Atlassian's mission is to unleash the potential in every team. Our products help teams organize, discuss, and complete their work. And what teams do can change the world. We have helped NASA teams design the Mars Rover, Cochlear teams develop hearing implants and hundreds of thousands of other teams do amazing things.

Amazon CodeGuru (Preview) is a service launched at AWS re:Invent 2019 that analyzes the performance characteristics of your application and provides automatic recommendations on ways to improve. It does this by profiling your application's runtime (with CodeGuru Profiler) and by automatically reviewing source code changes (with CodeGuru Reviewer). For more information, see What Is Amazon CodeGuru Profiler? This post gives a high-level overview of how CodeGuru Profiler works, common ways to use it, and how to improve your understanding of your application's performance in production. It assumes a basic knowledge of the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and related concepts such as threads and call stacks. CodeGuru Profiler provides insights into your application's runtime performance with a continuous, always-running production profiler.