Preferential path profiling

This paper describes preferential path profiling, which enables profiling a specified subset of all possible program paths with very low overhead. Preferential path profiling compactly identifies paths of interest using an array. More specifically, PPP assigns a unique and compact path index identifier to all interesting paths that can be used to index into a path array. The path array contains a second path value identifier that is used to distinguish interesting paths from other program paths This path numbering allows the implementation of preferential path profiling to use array-based counters instead of hash table-based counters for identifying paths of interest and gathering path profiles, which significantly reduces execution time and computational resource overhead during profiling.