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Truffle Branches Instrumentation

In languages implemented on top of Truffle, it is common that the AST implementations contain fast and slow execution paths, usually based on some condition, such as a profile. These execution paths are organized into different conditional branches. In these cases, it is often helpful to know if running the program actually exercised the code in each of those executions paths.

The branch instrumentation functionality instruments if-statements in target methods to track which of the branches have been taken during execution. Branch instrumentation does this by instrumenting branches with code that writes to a global table. Each branch has an entry in this table. When the program ends, the contents of the table are decoded and dumped to the standard output in readable form.

There are several flags that control how branch instrumentation works. These flags are specified as system properties:

  • --engine.InstrumentBranches - controls whether instrumentation is on (true or false, default is false)
  • --engine.InstrumentFilter - filters methods in which instrumentation should be done (method filter syntax, essentially <package>.<class>.<method>[.<signature>])
  • --engine.InstrumentationTableSize - controls the maximum number of instrumented locations
  • --engine.InstrumentBranchesPerInlineSite - controls whether instrumentation provides separate branch profiles for each guest language function/compilation unit (default is false).

Example Usage #

Here is an example of how to enable branch instrumentation on a program.

When using instrumentation to detect hot or infrequently used branches in a Truffle language implementation, it usually starts by finding a language node with a problematic method. The following command runs a unit test for the SimpleLanguage, and instruments all the if-statements:

mx --jdk jvmci sl --engine.BackgroundCompilation=false \
  --engine.InstrumentBranches \
  '--engine.InstrumentFilter=*.*.*' \
  ../truffle/truffle/com.oracle.truffle.sl.test/src/tests/LoopObjectDyn.sl

You get the following output:

Execution profile (sorted by hotness)
=====================================
  0: *****************************************************
  1: **************************

com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.access.SLPropertyCacheNode.namesEqual(SLPropertyCacheNode.java:109) [bci: 120]
[0] state = IF(if=36054#, else=0#)

com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.controlflow.SLWhileRepeatingNode.executeRepeating(SLWhileRepeatingNode.java:102) [bci: 5]
[1] state = BOTH(if=18000#, else=18#)

This output tells that both branches were visited in the if-statement in the file SLWhileRepeatingNode.java at line 102, and only the true branch was visited for the if-statement in the file SLPropertyCacheNode.java at line 109. However, it does not tell, e.g., where this specific SLPropertyCacheNode node was used from – the same execute method can be called from many different SimpleLanguage nodes, and you may wish to distinguish these occurrences. Therefore, set the per-inline-site flag to true, and change the filter to focus only on SLPropertyCacheNode:

mx --jdk jvmci sl -Dgraal.TruffleBackgroundCompilation=false \
  --engine.InstrumentBranchesPerInlineSite \
  --engine.InstrumentBranches \
  '--engine.InstrumentFilter=*.SLPropertyCacheNode.*' \
  ../truffle/truffle/com.oracle.truffle.sl.test/src/tests/LoopObjectDyn.sl

This time you get more output, because the method namesEqual was inlined at multiple sites (each site is represented by its inlining chain). The following output fragment first shows the histogram with the if-statement ID and its occurrence count. It then shows the exact call stacks and execution counts for the branches. For example, for [1], when namesEqual is called from executeRead, the true branch is taken 18018 times. When the namesEqual is called from executeWrite ([0]), the true branch is taken only 18 times:

Execution profile (sorted by hotness)
=====================================
  1: ***************************************
  2: ***************************************
  0:
  3:

com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.access.SLPropertyCacheNode.namesEqual(SLPropertyCacheNode.java:109) [bci: 120]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.access.SLReadPropertyCacheNodeGen.executeRead(SLReadPropertyCacheNodeGen.java:76) [bci: 88]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.access.SLReadPropertyNode.read(SLReadPropertyNode.java:71) [bci: 7]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.access.SLReadPropertyNodeGen.executeGeneric(SLReadPropertyNodeGen.java:30) [bci: 35]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.SLExpressionNode.executeLong(SLExpressionNode.java:81) [bci: 2]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.expression.SLLessThanNodeGen.executeBoolean_long_long0(SLLessThanNodeGen.java:42) [bci: 5]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.expression.SLLessThanNodeGen.executeBoolean(SLLessThanNodeGen.java:33) [bci: 14]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.controlflow.SLWhileRepeatingNode.evaluateCondition(SLWhileRepeatingNode.java:133) [bci: 5]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.controlflow.SLWhileRepeatingNode.executeRepeating(SLWhileRepeatingNode.java:102) [bci: 2]
org.graalvm.compiler.truffle.OptimizedOSRLoopNode.executeLoop(OptimizedOSRLoopNode.java:113) [bci: 61]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.controlflow.SLWhileNode.executeVoid(SLWhileNode.java:69) [bci: 5]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.controlflow.SLBlockNode.executeVoid(SLBlockNode.java:84) [bci: 37]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.controlflow.SLFunctionBodyNode.executeGeneric(SLFunctionBodyNode.java:81) [bci: 5]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.SLRootNode.execute(SLRootNode.java:78) [bci: 28]
[1] state = IF(if=18018#, else=0#)

...

com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.access.SLPropertyCacheNode.namesEqual(SLPropertyCacheNode.java:109) [bci: 120]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.access.SLWritePropertyCacheNodeGen.executeWrite(SLWritePropertyCacheNodeGen.java:111) [bci: 244]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.access.SLWritePropertyNode.write(SLWritePropertyNode.java:73) [bci: 9]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.access.SLWritePropertyNodeGen.executeGeneric(SLWritePropertyNodeGen.java:33) [bci: 47]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.access.SLWritePropertyNodeGen.executeVoid(SLWritePropertyNodeGen.java:41) [bci: 2]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.controlflow.SLBlockNode.executeVoid(SLBlockNode.java:84) [bci: 37]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.controlflow.SLFunctionBodyNode.executeGeneric(SLFunctionBodyNode.java:81) [bci: 5]
com.oracle.truffle.sl.nodes.SLRootNode.execute(SLRootNode.java:78) [bci: 28]
[0] state = IF(if=18#, else=0#)

...

Truffle Call Boundary Instrumentation #

The Truffle Call Boundary Instrumentation tool instruments callsites to methods that have a TruffleCallBoundary annotation, and counts the calls to those methods. It is controlled by the following set of flags:

  • --engine.InstrumentBoundaries - controls whether instrumentation is on (true or false, default is false)
  • --engine.InstrumentFilter - filters methods in which instrumentation should be done (method filter syntax, essentially <package>.<class>.<method>[.<signature>])
  • --engine.InstrumentationTableSize - controls the maximum number of instrumented locations
  • --engine.InstrumentBoundariesPerInlineSite - controls whether instrumentation is done per a declaration of an Truffle boundary call (false), or per every call stack where that callsite was inlined (true)

This tool can be used together with the Branch Instrumentation tool.

Assume that you need to find frequently occurring methods that were not, for example, inlined. The usual steps in identifying the Truffle call boundaries is to first run the program with the InstrumentBoundariesPerInlineSite flag set to false, and then, after identifying the problematic methods, set that flag to true and set the InstrumentFilter to identify the particular call stacks for those methods.

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