Combating Run-time Performance Bugs with Performance Claim Annotations

Abstract

Bugs in software are classified by a failure to meet some aspect of a specification. A piece of code which does not match the performance given by a specification contains a performance bug. We believe there is a need for better in-source language support and tools to assist a developer in mitigating and documenting performance bugs during the software development life cycle. In this paper, we present our performance claim annotation framework for specifying and monitoring the performance of a program. A performance claim annotation (PCA) is written by a programmer to assert a section of code’s run-time execution coincides with a specific metric (e.g. time elapsed) and they want to perform some action, typically logging, if the code fails to match the metric during execution. Our implementation uses a combination of the DWARF debugging format and the Pin dynamic binary instrumentation tool to provide an interface for building, using, and checking performance claims in order to reduce performance bugs during the development life cycle.