Reducing Overhead and Increasing Precision with Code Instrumentation

摘要

Mechanisms are provided for performing performance monitoring of code executing in the data processing system. A performance measurement is obtained for the execution of a region of code of interest. A determination is made as to whether an overhead associated with a current performance measurement mechanism is greater than a predetermined threshold amount of the performance measurement for the execution of the region of code of interest. A dynamic switch is performed from the current performance measurement mechanism to a second performance measurement mechanism, having a lower overhead, for obtaining performance measurements for the execution of the region of code of interest in response to the overhead associated with the current performance measurement mechanism being greater than the predetermined threshold amount of the performance measurement for the execution of the region of code of interest.