VIProf: Vertically Integrated Full-System Performance Profiler

In this paper, we present VIProf, a full-system, performance sampling system capable of extracting runtime behavior across an entire software stack. Our long-term goal is to employ VIProf profiles to guide online optimization of programs and their execution environments according to the dynamically changing execution behavior and resource availability. VIProf thus, must be transparent while producing accurate and useful performance profiles. We overview the design and implementation of VIProf and empirically evaluate the system using a popular software stack - one that includes a Linux operating system, a Java virtual machine, and a set of applications. This composition is commonly employed and important for high-end systems such as application and Web servers as well as computational grid services. We show that VIProf introduces little overhead and is able to capture accurate (function-level) full-system performance data that previously required multiple profiles and extensive, manual, and offline post-processing of profile data.