Actor profiling in virtual execution environments

Abstract

Nowadays, many virtual execution environments benefit from concurrency offered by the actor model. Unfortunately, while actors are used in many applications, existing profiling tools are not much effective in analyzing the performance of applications using actors. In this paper, we present a new instrumentation-based technique to profile actors in virtual execution environments. Our technique adopts platformindependent profiling metrics that minimize the perturbations induced by the instrumentation logic and allow comparing profiling results across different platforms. In particular, our technique measures the initialization cost, the amount of executed computations, and the messages sent and received by each actor. We implement our technique within a profiling tool for Akka actors on the Java platform. Evaluation results show that our profiling technique helps performance analysis of actor utilization and communication between actors in large-scale computing frameworks.