Research topic
This topic is the broad performance-analysis entry point for the catalog. It connects work on bottleneck localization, latency anomalies, resource contention, execution paths, tracing overhead, performance modeling, and diagnosis across multicore, cloud, web, and distributed systems.
Related search terms: software performance analysis · performance diagnosis · performance debugging
50 papers in this topic, ordered newest first. The detailed paper records contain the evidence-grounded methods, tools, datasets, findings, and citation guidance.
2026 · ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE)
B-Perf reconstructs execution, memory, and messaging behavior from Linux kernel-level traces and infers performance-antipattern indicators without requiring application source access or intrusive instrumentation.
Keywords: performance antipatterns · black-box detection · system-level execution traces · LTTng · Trace Compass
2026 · Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE)
The tutorial presents an end-to-end AgentOps workflow that connects task intent and model decisions to tool calls, memory access, inter-agent communication, external side effects, and runtime-governance decisions.
Keywords: agentic AI · AgentOps · runtime governance · AI observability · software agents
2026 · SIGSOFT FSE Companion
The paper reframes performance debugging as collaborative reasoning over multiple evidence-grounded hypotheses rather than optimization for one supposedly best explanation.
Keywords: performance debugging · collaborative reasoning · AgentDebug · Reasoning Surface · hypothesis generation
2025 · IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)
The paper introduces a taxonomy of log-event characteristics that explains why different log parsers fail across systems and parser families.
Keywords: log parsing · log event characteristics · LEC taxonomy · LogHub · Drain
2025 · Authorea preprint
The preprint combines communication-related kernel/system-call events with distributed traces to detect communication performance anti-patterns in microservices.
Keywords: communication anti-patterns · DeathStarBench · LTTng · Trace Compass · Jaeger
2025 · 2025 IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Advances in Software and COmputiNg (CASCON)
The paper models LLM inference energy separately on CPU and GPU using hardware counters, device metrics, and task/model features, then compares classical and neural regressors across language tasks.
Keywords: LLM energy consumption · CPU energy · GPU energy · green AI · static metrics
2025 · IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
The paper reconstructs missing system-call events in execution traces with diffusion and structured state-space generative models.
Keywords: execution trace reconstruction · trace imputation · diffusion models · DiffWave · SSSDS4
2024 · ACM/SPEC ICPE Companion
The paper identifies response-time variability in Alibaba microservice traces through critical-path extraction and variability analysis of service interactions.
Keywords: Alibaba microservice architecture · critical path · distributed traces · response-time variability · critical interactions
2024 · ACM/SPEC ICPE Companion
The work-in-progress paper combines service-call graph context, social-network analysis, and spectrum-based fault localization to rank distributed-trace root causes.
Keywords: context-aware RCA · service-call graph · distributed traces · service communities · Louvain
2024 · 2024 IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Advances in Software and COmputiNg (CASCON)
MemAdapt forecasts memory behavior under irregular sampling and uses the forecast to choose an adaptive monitoring rate that balances estimation quality with collection overhead.
Keywords: memory monitoring · irregular sampling · adaptive monitoring · time series · memory usage
2024 · ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) Companion
The paper applies graph community detection and service-graph clustering to expose recurring microservice communication structures in an Alibaba production-cluster snapshot.
Keywords: microservice networks · Alibaba production clusters · service call graphs · community detection · Louvain
2024 · 2024 IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Advances in Software and COmputiNg (CASCON)
The paper detects and localizes performance noise by aligning passive kernel-event evidence with the life cycle of CPU, disk, and network requests rather than treating resource utilization as an undifferentiated aggregate.
Keywords: kernel event monitoring · resource life cycle · noise detection · CPU requests · disk requests
2023 · 2023 IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)
EMD-SCS combines sequence prediction of system calls with sonification so that partial execution prefixes can support early malware detection and an interpretable auditory alert.
Keywords: malware detection · system-call sequences · sonification · Hamming distance · detection rate
2023 · ACM/SPEC ICPE Companion
The paper uses time-series analysis to identify and classify warmup, steady-state, and anomalous states in Java JMH microbenchmarks.
Keywords: Java Microbenchmark Harness · JMH · benchmark states · steady state · warmup
2023 · 2023 IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Research (SERA)
The paper presents a multi-level adaptive tracing workflow that uses lightweight stress detection and performance evidence to change the application/kernel instrumentation scope during an investigation.
Keywords: adaptive execution tracing · time-series trends · multi-level tracing · kernel tracing · performance analysis
2023 · IEEE Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)
PASD uses Linux kernel-event traces, Perf call stacks, and statistical debugging to rank functions associated with performance problems without application-source instrumentation.
Keywords: statistical debugging · Linux kernel tracepoints · Perf · perf record · call stacks
2023 · Companion of the 2023 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE '23 Companion)
The study examines whether static source-code features are associated with the steady-state behavior of Java microbenchmarks during JVM warmup.
Keywords: Java Microbenchmark Harness · JMH · srcML · Lizard · Apriori
2023 · IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)
The paper classifies recurring log-parsing errors and connects them to token and event characteristics that can guide parser design and logging practice.
Keywords: log parsing · parser errors · Drain · AEL · Spell
2023 · ACM/SPEC ICPE Companion
The paper uses sampled call graphs and machine learning to distinguish warmup from steady-state executions in Java microbenchmarks.
Keywords: Java · JMH · microbenchmarking · steady-state detection · warmup
2022 · IEEE Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)
N-Lane Bridge extends One-Lane Bridge analysis to active-resource bottlenecks and uses LTTng system-level traces to distinguish application-caused congestion from external interference.
Keywords: N-Lane Bridge · One-Lane Bridge · performance antipatterns · system-level execution tracing · LTTng
2022 · 30th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)
The framework combines critical-path extraction, coarse anomaly checks, OPTICS execution clustering, and MUSCLE multiple sequence alignment to localize performance differences in system-level traces.
Keywords: sequence alignment · MUSCLE · OPTICS · critical path · system-level traces
2022 · Performance Evaluation
The paper unifies Chromium user-space events with Linux kernel scheduling and resource events to analyze execution paths and localize sporadic latency in a complex multithreaded application.
Keywords: multi-thread applications · execution paths · performance evaluation · thread behavior
2022 · 2022 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E)
This poster proposes operating-system-aware antipattern detection that uses system-level traces and scalability trends to expose resource blocking that aggregate CPU utilization can hide.
Keywords: operating-system support · application performance analysis · performance instrumentation · IC2E 2022 · poster paper
2021 · International Journal of Parallel Programming
The paper automatically builds an approximate workflow model and adaptive quantitative constraints from user-space and kernel execution traces, reducing manual model construction for real-time and multicore diagnosis.
Keywords: model-based constraints · execution tracing · multi-core systems · real-time applications · constraint generation
2021 · Electronics
The paper combines Jaeger distributed traces with LTTng kernel and user-space events and extends critical-path analysis from threads to distributed requests so request latency can be related to low-level scheduling and resource behavior.
Keywords: distributed tracing · kernel tracing · cloud applications · cross-layer performance analysis · LTTng
2021 · IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom)
The paper characterizes container workloads from host-level LTTng traces by selecting important threads and clustering execution-state behavior without instrumenting the containers internally.
Keywords: container workloads · host tracing · LTTng · pid_ns · tid
2021 · Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing
The paper correlates LTTng traces from user space through kernel, storage, network, and multiple hosts in a disk-backed state model, enabling top-down diagnosis of distributed request latency.
Keywords: distributed requests · multilevel trace analysis · LTTng · Apache · PHP
2021 · 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)
The paper presents a low-intrusion heap monitor that records allocation call stacks and uses persistent heap-growth filtering plus trace correlation to identify likely memory-leak roots.
Keywords: heap monitoring · memory leaks · root-cause analysis · memory management · BigData 2021
2021 · 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Networks, Computers and Communications (ISNCC)
The paper provides a graphical state-machine modeling tool that generates trace analyses and integrates them into Trace Compass, reducing the need to hand-code state providers or XML analyses.
Keywords: state-machine traces · trace indexing · special-purpose database · Gantt chart · XY view
2021 · 2021 IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon)
The work bridges kernel-level hardware-counter sampling and user-space interpreter state so execution-path profiling can attribute performance evidence to interpreted code.
Keywords: execution paths · hardware performance counters · critical-path profiling · CPython · PyPMU
2021 · Journal of Hardware and Systems Security
The paper proposes a cloud-side anomaly detector that combines traffic, virtual-machine resource, and kernel-level indicators to identify several DDoS classes through change-point evidence.
Keywords: DDoS attacks · cloud environment · CUSUM · bandwidth exhaustion · application exhaustion
2020 · IEEE Internet of Things, GreenCom, CPSCom and SmartData
The paper correlates LTTng traces across OpenStack services, QEMU/KVM, network components, and host kernels to diagnose cloud-platform performance problems.
Keywords: cloud platforms · multi-level execution tracing · LTTng · LTTng-UST · OpenStack Nova
2020 · IEEE 20th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)
DepGraph uses system-level tracing to expose the waiting dependencies that divide a task's execution time across threads and hardware resources.
Keywords: waiting dependency graph · system-level tracing · blocking dependencies · performance bottlenecks · thread-resource interactions
2020 · IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops (ISSREW)
The paper extends critical-path analysis across kernel and user-space lock events so contention from futexes, spinlocks, semaphores, and other synchronization mechanisms can be diagnosed without recompiling the application.
Keywords: lock contention · multi-level execution traces · LTTng 2.10 · Trace Compass 4 · LD_PRELOAD
2019 · Journal of Systems Architecture
The paper redesigns GDB dynamic tracing around LTTng-UST and scalable trace views so multi-threaded CPU/GPU debugging remains usable on heterogeneous many-core systems.
Keywords: heterogeneous systems · dynamic tracing · large-scale debugging · debugging efficiency · GDB
2019 · Journal of Hardware and Systems Security
The paper combines execution-trace and virtual-machine metrics with machine learning to detect EDoS behavior and restrict resource expansion to apparently normal VMs.
Keywords: Economic Denial of Sustainability · EDoS · DDoS · cloud computing · execution trace analysis
2018 · IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE)
The paper correlates OpenStack Nova, QEMU/KVM, and host/guest kernel evidence to diagnose live-migration behavior across cloud-system layers.
Keywords: cloud tracing · high-level tracing · low-level tracing · cross-layer observability · OpenStack Nova
2018 · IEEE Systems Conference
The paper correlates PHP user-space events with LTTng kernel events in a unified multilevel model to explain high-latency web requests.
Keywords: high latency · dynamic analysis · multilevel analysis · latency causes · LTTng
2017 · Software Quality Journal
The framework lets analysts define stateful trace analyses declaratively, using a generic state model and XML specifications that can drive storage, filtering, and visualization across trace formats.
Keywords: declarative trace analysis · stateful analysis · execution traces · LTTng · ETW
2017 · IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC)
The paper introduces a kernel-resident dynamic sampler that tracks virtual and physical memory usage while reducing the event volume generated by high-frequency memory activity.
Keywords: memory usage · dynamic sampling · enterprise applications · trace overhead · LTTng
2017 · Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
The survey provides a taxonomy and requirements-oriented comparison of techniques for collecting, abstracting, analyzing, visualizing, and navigating large execution traces.
Keywords: trace navigation · multi-scale analysis · trace visualization · content abstraction · metric abstraction
2016 · IEEE Future Internet of Things and Cloud Workshops (FiCloudW)
The paper fuses synchronized host and virtual-machine kernel traces into a Fused Virtual Machine view that exposes how VM threads, virtual CPUs, hypervisor transitions, and physical CPUs interact.
Keywords: virtualized systems · kernel tracing · multilayer analysis · virtualization overhead · LTTng
2015 · Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
The paper proposes a multilevel data-cube model for computing statistics over live execution traces across several time scales.
Keywords: data cube · stream cube · live trace statistics · LTTng · State History Tree
2014 · 2014 IEEE 27th Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE)
The paper presents multiscale trace navigation that links raw kernel events to system-call, synthetic, and fault/alert abstractions in a zoomable timeline.
Keywords: large trace data · multiscale navigation · zoomable timeline · semantic zoom · physical zoom
2013 · ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
The framework computes system-parameter statistics for arbitrary intervals and resource hierarchies from very large traces using a disk-resident history structure and controlled granularity.
Keywords: trace statistics · LTTng · Linux kernel 2.6.38.6 · disk-resident interval tree · history tree
2013 · Runtime Verification 2013 (RV 2013)
The paper introduces a disk-backed state-history model that incrementally converts trace events into queryable state intervals, enabling scalable timestamp/state queries and visualization without replaying the entire trace.
Keywords: system states · trace queries · trace visualization · interval data · tree-based storage
2013 · 2013 IEEE 26th Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE)
The paper develops a multilevel trace-label placement algorithm that preserves readable, semantically meaningful labels while users zoom and pan across dense execution-trace views.
Keywords: execution trace events · label placement · trace visualization · overlap avoidance · event labels
2012 · Advances in Software Engineering
The paper introduces a stateful trace-abstraction method that converts low-level kernel events into semantic and synthetic events using modeled resource state and finite-state patterns.
Keywords: stateful trace abstraction · synthetic events · semantic events · modeled state · finite-state machine
2012 · 16th IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications (SEA 2012)
The paper introduces a stateful trace-abstraction architecture that shares modeled system state and intermediate computation across concurrent patterns to reduce the cost of analyzing large Linux kernel traces.
Keywords: multi-core tracing · LTTng · Linux kernel 2.6.38.6 · stateful trace analysis · trace abstraction
2010 · Wireless Sensor Network
The paper proposes L-SYNCng, a time-synchronization protocol for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks that combines topology-aware clustering with convex-hull clock estimation.
Keywords: wireless sensor networks · time synchronization · L-SYNCng · convex hull · clock drift