ENABLING REAL TIME INSTRUMENTATION USING RESERVOIR SAMPLING AND BIN PACKING

Software Instrumentation is the process of collecting data during an application’s runtime,

which will help us debug, detect errors and optimize the performance of the binary. The

recent increase in demand for low latency and high throughput systems has introduced new

challenges to the process of Software Instrumentation. Software Instrumentation, especially

dynamic, has a huge impact on systems performance in scenarios where there is no early

knowledge of data to be collected. Naive approaches collect too much or too little

data, negatively impacting the system’s performance.

This thesis investigates the overhead added by reservoir sampling algorithms at different

levels of granularity in real-time instrumentation of distributed software systems. Also, this thesis describes the implementation of sampling techniques and algorithms to reduce the overhead caused by instrumentation.