LOCKLESS MEASUREMENT OF EXECUTION TIME OF CONCURRENTLY EXECUTED SEQUENCES OF COMPUTER PROGRAM INSTRUCTIONS

摘要

A computer system supports measuring execution time of concurrent threads. A thread allocates a timing buffer in thread local storage. During execution, the thread has access to a system timer which it can sample with microsecond or better precision with a single instruction. For any sequence of instructions within the thread for which execution time is to be measured, the sequence of instructions includes an identifier, a start command, and an end command. The start command samples the system timer to obtain a start time, and stores the identifier and the start time in the timing buffer in the thread local storage. The end command samples the system timer to obtain an end time, and updates the data for the corresponding identifier in the timing buffer, to indicate an elapsed time for execution of the sequence of instructions.