PMMS - A FRAMEWORK AND SYSTEM FOR HIGH-LEVEL PROGRAM MONITORING AND MEASURING

Program monitoring and measuring (PMM) is the activity of collecting empirical data during a program's execution to answer performance questions. PMM is usually done by altering the program to collect interesting data as it runs. Unfortunately, this is itself an arduous task involving all the difficulties of program construction and maintenance. Generally there are four programming tasks involved: determining what data has to be collected, determining where in the program that data can be collected, adding code to collect that data and adding code to process it to produce the desired results. We describe a working system called PMMS that automates each of these tasks. It accepts as input a very high level description of what a programmer wants to know and automatically produces an instrumented version of the program whose execution produces both the result of the original program and the desired data.