Measuring program behavior is easy; understanding program behavior is hard. Program profiling tools record many aspects of programs' execution. Such tools generate reams of data but offer little support to the end user in analyzing and understanding this data.
We have built a tool, called the Hot Path Browser (HPB) for graphically displaying path profiles. Even large complex programs, such as gcc and Microsoft Word, only execute a few thousands of paths in an execution. HPB helps the user analyze the path profile data from one or more runs of the program. HPB imports path profiles described in an extensible ASCII data format. Its browser-like windowing interface provides mechanisms for isolating and displaying heavily executed paths.
In this talk, I will give an overview of the HPB tool, demonstrate some of this capabilities, and describe our experience in using it. This is a joint work with James R. Larus and Thomas Ball (Lucent Technologies). The HPB tool was presented at the PFDC 98 workshop.