Performance Measurement of Interpreted Programs

Tia Newhall and Barton P. Miller

Abstract
In an interpreted execution there is an interdependence between the interpreter program's execution and the interpreted application's execution; the interpreter's implementation determines how the interpreted application is executed, and the interpreted application triggers certain interpreter program activities. We present a model for describing performance data froman interpreted execution that explicitly represents the interaction between the interpreter and the interpreted application. We present results of an implementation of a performance tool based on our model for interpreted Java programs. We use performance data from our tool to tune a Java application program, and improve its performance by more than 70%.
Contact
Tia Newhall
Computer Sciences-UW,1210 W. Dayton St.,53706, Madison, WI, USA,
newhall@cs.wisc.edu