article

Free access

Performance assertion checking

Authors:

Sharon E. Perl,

William E. WeihlAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 27, Issue 5

Pages 134 - 145

https://doi.org/10.1145/173668.168630

Published: 01 December 1993 Publication History

Abstract

Performance assertion checking is an approach to automating the testing of performance properties of complex systems. System designers write assertions that capture expectations for performance; these assertions are checked automatically against monitoring data to detect potential performance bugs. Automatically checking expectations allows a designer to test a wide range of performance properties as a system evolves: data that meets expectations can be discarded automatically, focusing attention on data indicating potential problems.PSpec is a language for writing performance as sertions together with tools for testing assertions and estimating values for constants in assertions. The language is small and efficiently checkable, yet capable of expressing a wide variety of performance properties. Initial experience indicates that PSpec is a useful tool for performance testing and debugging; it helped uncover several performance bugs in the runtime system of a parallel programming language.

References

[1]

Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, and Peter J. Weinberger. The A WK Programming Language. Series in Computer Science. Addison Wesley, 1989.

Digital Library

[2]

Thomas E. Anderson and Edward D. Lazowska. Quartz: A tool for tuning parallel program performance. In Proceedings of the Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, SiGMETRICS '90, May 1990.

Digital Library

[3]

David Bernstein, Anthony Bolmarcich, and Kimming So. Performance visualization of parallel programs on a shared memory multiprocessor system. In Proceedings of the 1989 international Conference on Parallel Processing, volume II, pages 1-10, August 1989.

[4]

E.A. Brewer, C.N. Dellarocas, A. Colbrook, and W.E. Weihl. P~OTEUS: A highperformance parallel-architecture simulator. Technical Report MIT/LCS/TR-516, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, September 1991.

Digital Library

[5]

D. Cohen. AP5 User's Manual. iSI/USC, 1988.

[6]

Digital Equipment Corporation. pixie(i). U1- trix 4.0 General Information, Vol. 3B (Commands(i): M-Z).

[7]

Yogesh Gaur, Vincent A. Guarna Jr., and David jablonowski. An environment for performance experimentation on multiprocessors. In Proceedings of SUPERCOMPUTING '89, pages 589-594. IEEE Computer Society and ACM SIGARCH, November 1989.

Digital Library

[8]

S. L. Graham, P.B. Kessler, and M.K. McKusick. Gprof: A call graph execution profiler. In Proceedings of the A CM SIGPLAN Symposium on Compiler Construction, June 1982.

Digital Library

[9]

Michael T. Heath and Jennifer A. Etheridge. Visualizing the performance of parallel programs. IEEE Software, 8(5):29-39, September 1991.

Digital Library

[10]

Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. The C Programming Language. Prentice Hall Software Series. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 2nd edition, 1988.

Digital Library

[11]

Ted Lehr, Zary Segall, Dalibor Vrsalovic, Eddie Caplan, Alan L. Chung, and Charles E. Fineman. Visualizing performance debugging. IEEE Computer, 22(10):38-51, October 1989.

Digital Library

[12]

Yingsha Liao and Donald Cohen. A specificational approach to high level program monitoring and measuring. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 18( 11 ):969- 978, November 1992.

Digital Library

[13]

Allen D. Malony, David H. Hammerslag, and David J. Jablonowski. Traceview: A trace visualization tool. IEEE Software, 8(5):19-28, September 1991.

Digital Library

[14]

Greg Nelson, editor. Systems Programming With Modula-3. Prentice Hall Series in Innovative Technology. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1991.

Digital Library

[15]

Sharon E. Perl. Performance assertion checking. Technical Report MIT/LCS/TR-551, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, Cambridge, MA 02139, September 1992.

Digital Library

[16]

Richard Snodgrass. A relational approach to monitoring complex systems. A CM Transactions on Computer Systems, 6(2):157-196, May 1988.

Digital Library

[17]

Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz. Programming Pcrl. O'Reilly and Associates, Sebastopol, CA, 1991.

Digital Library

[18]

W.E. Weihl, E.A. Brewer, A. Colbrook, C.N. Dellarocas, W.C. Hsieh, A.D. Joseph, C. WaJdspurger, and P. Wang. PRELUDE: A system for building portable parallel software. Technical Report MIT/LCS/TR-519, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, October 1991.

Digital Library

Cited By

Bhattacharyya AJandaghi SSotiriadis SAmza C(2016)Semantic Aware Online Detection of Resource Anomalies on the Cloud2016 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom)10.1109/CloudCom.2016.0035(134-143)Online publication date: Dec-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/CloudCom.2016.0035
Bulej LBureš TGerostathopoulos IHorký VKeznikl JMarek LTschaikowski MTribastone MTůma P(2015)Supporting Performance Awareness in Autonomous EnsemblesSoftware Engineering for Collective Autonomic Systems10.1007/978-3-319-16310-9_8(291-322)Online publication date: 2015
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16310-9_8
Bulej LBureš TKeznikl JKoubková APodzimek ATůma PKaeli DRolia JJohn LKrishnamurthy D(2012)Capturing performance assumptions using stochastic performance logicProceedings of the 3rd ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering10.1145/2188286.2188345(311-322)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2188286.2188345
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Performance assertion checking
PERFORMANCE ASSERTION CHECKING
Performance assertion checking
SOSP '93: Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles

Performance assertion checking is an approach to automating the testing of performance properties of complex systems. System designers write assertions that capture expectations for performance; these assertions are checked automatically against ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Volume 27, Issue 5

Dec. 1993

283 pages

ISSN:0163-5980

DOI:10.1145/173668

Editor:
William M. Waite
Univ. of Colorado, Boulder

Issue’s Table of Contents

SOSP '93: Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
January 1994
284 pages
ISBN:0897916328
DOI:10.1145/168619
Chairmen:
Andrew P. Black
Digital Equipment Corp.
,
Barbara Liskov
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge

Copyright © 1993 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 December 1993

Published in SIGOPS Volume 27, Issue 5

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

44
Total Citations
View Citations
923
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)165
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)26

Reflects downloads up to 22 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Bhattacharyya AJandaghi SSotiriadis SAmza C(2016)Semantic Aware Online Detection of Resource Anomalies on the Cloud2016 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom)10.1109/CloudCom.2016.0035(134-143)Online publication date: Dec-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/CloudCom.2016.0035
Bulej LBureš TGerostathopoulos IHorký VKeznikl JMarek LTschaikowski MTribastone MTůma P(2015)Supporting Performance Awareness in Autonomous EnsemblesSoftware Engineering for Collective Autonomic Systems10.1007/978-3-319-16310-9_8(291-322)Online publication date: 2015
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16310-9_8
Bulej LBureš TKeznikl JKoubková APodzimek ATůma PKaeli DRolia JJohn LKrishnamurthy D(2012)Capturing performance assumptions using stochastic performance logicProceedings of the 3rd ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering10.1145/2188286.2188345(311-322)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2188286.2188345
Eom HHollingsworth J(2001)A Tool to Help Tune where Computation Is PerformedIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/32.93585427:7(618-629)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2001
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/32.935854
Rogora DCarzaniga ADiwan AHauswirth MSoulé RBilas AMagoutis KMarkatos EKostic DSeltzer M(2020)Analyzing system performance with probabilistic performance annotationsProceedings of the Fifteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3342195.3387554(1-14)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3342195.3387554
Lepers BGouicem RCarver DLozi JPalix NAponte MZwaenepoel WSopena JLawall JMuller GBilas AMagoutis KMarkatos EKostic DSeltzer M(2020)Provable multicore schedulers with IpanemaProceedings of the Fifteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3342195.3387544(1-16)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3342195.3387544
Carver DGouicem RLozi JSopena JLepers BZwaenepoel WPalix NLawall JMuller G(2019)Fork/Wait and Multicore Frequency ScalingProceedings of the 10th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/3365137.3365400(53-59)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3365137.3365400
Jimenez IWatkins NSevilla MLofstead JMaltzahn CWolter KKnottenbelt Wvan Hoorn ANambiar MKoziolek H(2018)quihoProceedings of the 2018 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering10.1145/3184407.3184422(273-284)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3184407.3184422
Lepers BZwaenepoel WLozi JPalix NGouicem RSopena JLawall JMuller G(2017)Towards Proving Optimistic Multicore SchedulersProceedings of the 16th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems10.1145/3102980.3102984(18-23)Online publication date: 7-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3102980.3102984
Bulej LBureš THorký VKotrăź JMarek LTrojánek TTźMa P(2017)Unit testing performance with Stochastic Performance LogicAutomated Software Engineering10.1007/s10515-015-0188-024:1(139-187)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10515-015-0188-0
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents