Parameter value characterization of Windows NT-based applications

Abstract

Compiler optimizations such as code specialization and partial evaluation can be used to effectively exploit identifiable invariance of variable values. To identify the invariant variables that the compiler misses at compile time, value profiling can provide valuable information. We focus on the invariance of procedure parameters for a set of desktop applications run on MS Windows NT 4.0. Most of those applications are non-scientific and execute interactively through a rich GUI. Due to the dynamic nature of this workload, one would expect that parameter values would exhibit an unpredictable behavior. Our work attempts to address this question by measuring the invariance and temporal locality of parameter values. We also measure she invariance of parameter values for four benchmarks from the SPECINT95 suite for comparison.