Elephant Tracks 3

A rewritten version of the garbage collection tracing tool for Java programs, Elephant Tracks, developed by the RedLine Research Group @ Tufts University Department of Computer Science. ET3 is written from scratch in order to improve the performance of Elephant Tracks and for compatibility with the HotSpot JVM.

How we got here

• Elephant Tracks 1 is a JVMTI agent written in C++. There were compatibility issues as ET1 could only run with Java 1.6. This limited the number of applications it could run with.
• Elephant Tracks 2 - An early prototype for ET2 was created by the native instrumentation library JNIF by Ray Qi was up and running but we couldn't successfully run the DaCapo benchmarks with it.
• Elephant Tracks 3 (the latest version) uses Javassist which uses the ASM library underneath.

Improvements

Instead of using the [JNIF] library for instrumentation through the JVMTI interface, ET3 uses the Javassist library through the Java agent instrumentation. Javassist is itself based on on the ASM bytecode rewriting library. The instrumentation methods in ET2 that were written in Java are reused for ET3 with some modifications.

The important idea behind ET2 and ET3 is that instead of creating and tracing object graphs at runtime (as ET1 does), ET3 generates data that allows the object graphs to be generated offline after the program ends.

Using ET3

Requirements

• Java 8
• Javassist 3.25.0-GA
• For the trace analysis programs:
  • gcc/g++ or clang++ (TODO: Which versions did we use?)
  • cmake 3.9 or greater

Build using Maven

• mvn clean compile package
• Look for the jar file instrumenter-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar and copy to working directory.

Running your jar with the ET3 Java agent

• java -javaagent:./instrumenter-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar -jar YouProgram.jar
• To run a selected DaCapo benchmark:
  • java -javaagent:./instrumenter-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar -jar dacapo-9.12-bach.jar --no-validation -t 8 avrora
    • Earlier prototypes of ET3 had issues when running with largish values for thread number (-t). Currently the issues seem to have disappeared but are not guaranteed to be bug-free. Please let us know if you run into any problems running with large number of threads.
    • The --no-validation is currently required as DaCapo complains loudly if left out. This is because we do bytecode rewriting which causes DaCapo to declare our run as invalid.

Current Status

• ET3 can run the DaCapo benchmarks if run with the --no-validation option.

Licensing

See the "LICENSE" file.