Software Monitoring with Controllable Overhead

Xiaowan Huang, Justin Seyster, Sean Callanan, Ketan Dixit, Radu Grosu, Scott A. Smolka, Scott D. Stoller, and Erez Zadok.

We introduce the technique of Software Monitoring with Controllable Overhead (SMCO), which is based on a novel combination of supervisory control theory of discrete event systems and PID-control theory of discrete time systems. SMCO controls monitoring overhead by temporarily disabling monitoring of selected events for as short a time as possible under the constraint of a user-supplied target overhead ot. This strategy is optimal in the sense that it allows SMCO to monitor as many events as possible, within the confines of ot. SMCO is a general monitoring technique that can be applied to any system interface or API.

We have applied SMCO to a variety of monitoring problems, including two highlighted in this paper: integer range analysis, which determines upper and lower bounds on integer variable values; and Non-Accessed Period (NAP) detection, which detects stale or underutilized memory allocations. We benchmarked SMCO extensively, using both CPU- and I/O-intensive workloads, which often exhibited highly bursty behavior. We demonstrate that SMCO successfully controls overhead across a wide range of target-overhead levels; its accuracy monotonically increases with the target overhead; and it can be configured to distribute monitoring overhead fairly across multiple instrumentation points.

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