Exploiting software interfaces for performance measurement

Software performance measurement can be a difficult and tedious procedure, and this difficulty may explain the lack of interest shown in software performance optimisation in all but the most demanding areas, such as parallel computation and embedded systems. This paper describes the measurement shim. an approach to software perfor-mance which we have found to significantly reduce the effort required to make performance measurements. The measurement shim exploits the interfaces between software modules, and allows measurement at both data stream and procedure call interfaces. Experimental results indicate that the measurement shim provides high-quality data, and can he inserted with low impact on system performance.