Timestamped whole program path representation and its applications

A whole program path (WPP) is a complete control flow trace of a program's execution. Recently Larus 18 showed that although WPP is expected to be very large (100's of MBytes), it can be greatly compressed (to 10's of MBytes) and therefore saved for future analysis. While the compression algorithm proposed by Larus is highly effective, the compression is accompanied with a loss in the ease with which subsets of information can be accessed. In particular, path traces pertaining to a particular function cannot generally be obtained without examining the entire compressed WPP representation. To solve this problem we advocate the application of compaction techniques aimed at providing easy access to path traces on a per function basis.