Building a Continuous Profiling Infrastructure Environment for Linux

Collin McCurdy

Abstract: The Digital Continuous Profiling Infrastructure provides a low-overhead means of continuously sampling the program counter of running applications (including the kernel) to facilitate profiling. This work explores issues that arise while implementing a similar profiling system in the Linux environment. First, we describe the data collection mechanism of the DCPI implementation. Next we describe the details our implementation. Finally we demonstrate our tool in use, with an example sampling session and the output of a simple analysis tool which operates on the collected samples.

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