Alignment-Based Metrics for Trace Comparison

Due to the complexity of today's architectures and applications, performance analysis and optimization are essential, and trace-based techniques have proven to be a powerful approach. However, a manual comparison of traces is difficult and time consuming because of the large volume of detailed data and the need to correctly line up trace events. Our solution is a set of techniques that automatically align traces so they can be compared, along with novel metrics that quantify the differences between traces, both in terms of differences in the event stream and timing differences across events. Further, we introduce visualization techniques that highlight and facilitate understanding of the sources of the differences. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution by showing automatically detected performance and code differences across different versions of two real-world applications.