Analyzing dynamic binary instrumentation overhead. WBIA at ASPLOS

Robust and powerful software instrumentation tools are es-sential for dynamic program analysis tasks such as profiling, performance evaluation, and bug detection. Dynamic binary instrumentation (DBI) is a general purpose technique that eases the development of program analysis tools by facili-tating automatic low-level instrumentation. DBI-based pro-gram analysis can introduce high overhead and it is crucial for tool writers to minimize the cost. Analyzing the per-formance of instrumentation tools is challenging because most systems use a just-in-time compiler (JIT) to dynami-cally generate code. In this paper, we describe our method for analyzing the performance of instrumentation tools. The instrumented code is itself instrumented with basic block counters. We implement the profiler in Pin and use it to an-alyze the behavior of simple and complex instrumentation tools. The analysis yields several unexpected results about the dynamic behavior of instrumented programs. By exam-ining these results, we often find effective solutions to im-prove performance. 1