ConfigCrusher: Towards White-Box Performance Analysis for Configurable Systems

Understand

Stakeholders of configurable systems are often interested in knowing how configuration options influence the performance of a system to facilitate, for example, the debugging and optimization processes of these systems.

• Several black-box approaches can be used to obtain this information, but they either sample a large number of configurations to make accurate predictions or miss important performance-influencing interactions when sampling few configurations.
• Furthermore, black-box approaches cannot pinpoint the parts of a system that are responsible for performance differences among configurations.
• This article proposes ConfigCrusher, a white-box performance analysis that inspects the implementation of a system to guide the performance analysis, exploiting several insights of configurable systems in the process.