CAREER: Combating Performance Bugs in Software Systems

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Performance bugs cause unintended performance degradation and energy waste in mainstream software. These bugs can easily slow down production software for several times and are posing increasing threat to software quality with the meager increases in single threaded performance in multi-core era and an increasing emphasis on energy efficiency.Previous works for performance bugs, including testing and profiling, mostly treat software as a black-box, and are usually too late or ineffective in preventing the damage of performance bugs. This NSF CAREER research project seeks to develop systems and tools that take a white-box approach to addressing the open problem of performance bugs. First, it conducts an empirical study to enrich the understanding of performance bugs in real-world. Second, it develops tools that can automatically detect performance bugs before, during, and after bug manifestation. Third, it designs a testing framework to expose performance bugs before software release. Finally, it also looks at the performance bug issue in multi-threaded programs.The education focus of this project is to broaden the software curriculum to bring students more awareness and exercise of performance and correctness issues in software, especially multi-threaded software.This research will improve the understanding of performance waste problem in software, provide substantial tool support to help lower software development and performance testing costs, and improve software users' everyday experience through faster software. It will also help improve the energy efficiency of production-run software and protect environment in the field.