Reducing Instrumentation Overhead when Reverse-Engineering Object Interactions

Reverse-engineering object interactions from source

code can be done through static, dynamic, or hybrid (static plus

dynamic) analyses. In the latter two, monitoring a program and

collecting runtime information translates into some overhead

during program execution. Depending on the type of application,

the imposed overhead can reduce the precision and accuracy of

the reverse-engineered object interactions (the larger the overhead

the less precise or accurate the reverse-engineered interactions),

to such an extent that the reverse-engineered interactions

may not be correct, especially when reverse-engineering a multithreaded

software system. One is therefore seeking an instrumentation

strategy as less intrusive as possible. In our past work, we

showed that a hybrid approach is one step towards such a solution,

compared to a purely dynamic approach, and that there is

room for improvements. In this paper, we uncover, in a systematic

way, other aspects of the dynamic analysis that can be improved

to further reduce runtime overhead, and study alternative

solutions. Our experiments show effective overhead reduction

thanks to a modified procedure to collect runtime information.