End-to-end memory behavior profiling with DINAMITE

Abstract

Performance bottlenecks related to a program's memory behavior are common, yet very hard to debug. Tools that attempt to aid software engineers in diagnosing these bugs are typically designed to handle specific use cases; they do not provide information to comprehensively explore memory problems and to find solutions. Detailed traces of memory accesses would enable developers to ask various questions about the program's memory behaviour, but these traces quickly become very large even for short executions. We present DINAMITE: a toolkit for Dynamic INstrumentation and Analysis for MassIve Trace Exploration. DINAMITE instruments every memory access with highly debug information and provides a suite of extensible analysis tools to aid programmers in pinpointing memory bottlenecks.