Field Monitoring With Delayed Saving

Abstract

Field monitoring techniques can collect data about the behavior of software applications while running in the field, with real users and real data. Developers can exploit the information extracted from the field to timely improve, tune, and fix their systems, anticipating feedback by users. It is, however, challenging to extract a relevant amount of information from field executions without introducing significant overhead. This paper addresses this challenge by studying how to inexpensively trace data in-memory while postponing save operations to idle time, so that the operations requested by users are exposed to a negligible overhead only. In particular, this paper presents delayed saving, a technique that efficiently traces references to objects, opportunistically saving information only when the monitored application is not serving any user request. Storing references and postponing save operations may introduce inaccuracy in the collected data, that is, a lately saved object might be in a different state compared to the state of the object at the time it was traced. Our evaluation shows that the level of inaccuracy introduced by delayed saving is limited compared to its efficiency and low intrusiveness. INDEX TERMS Monitoring, tracing, dynamic analysis.

A family of experiments about how developers perceive delayed system response time

“…The reported findings can be exploited to improve field monitoring techniques, for example, controlled burst recording (CBR) (Cornejo et al., 2017b , 2020b ) and delayed saving (Cornejo et al, 2019 ).…”

“…Delayed saving (Cornejo et al, 2019 ) is a technique that allows to save extensive amount of data in memory while waiting for computer inactivity to save the data to disk without annoying users. To inexpensively keep data in memory while waiting to be saved, delayed saving does not copy values but maintains reference to live objects.…”

CBR: Controlled Burst Recording

“…Finally, some techniques can be generally useful to optimize resource consumptions and further reduce overhead, such as Delayed Saving that can reduce the cost of persisting the information about the collected events [48]. These kinds of approaches can be integrated in CBR to further improve its performance.…”

In-The-Field Monitoring of Functional Calls: Is It Feasible?

“…This strategy has been exploited in the context of debugging [7,8], program verification [41], and profiling [42]. Finally, monitoring can be optimized carefully balancing in-memory and saving operations [43]. The results reported in this paper can be exploited by these techniques and by practitioners [44], to further optimize their monitoring strategy, collecting more data without affecting users.…”