Efficiently counting program events with support for on-line queries

1 September 1994

journal article
Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems

Vol. 16 (5) , 1399-1410
https://doi.org/10.1145/186025.186027

Abstract

The ability to count events in a program's execution is required by many program analysis applications. We represent an instrumentation method for efficiently counting events in a program's execution, with support for on-line queries of the event count. Event counting differs from basic block profiling in that an aggregate count of events is kept rather than a set of counters. Due to this difference, solutions to basic block profiling are not well suited to event counting. Our algorithm finds a subset of points in a program to instrument, while guaranteeing that accurate event counts can be obtained efficiently at every point in the execution.

Keywords

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