ByCounter

Welcome to the home of ByCounter!

Description

ByCounter is an approach for portable bytecode counting at runtime - without the need to instrument or to alter the Virtual Machine (VM)
It supports measurements of bytecode instructions and method invocations on different granularity levels. It supports measuring a single line of code or a sequence of lines as well as per-method measurements.
Support for method- and class-crossing measurements: The bytecode instructions issued by called methods can be measured and transparently reported. Configuration settings allow defining which calls should be in- or excluded.
It ensures that all bytecode instructions and method invocations are measured and does not rely on sampling.
It can provide results for multiple threads including their call hierarchy and allows to distinguish between different requests to instrumented code areas.
ByCounter also counts method invocations, and supports parameter recording, instrumentation using "agents" conforming to java.lang.instrument Java API package, and other features.
It uses the bytecode instrumentation framework ASM, and has a low runtime overhead while still providing exact, per-opcode counts.
ByCounter is part of BySuite.

Implementation

ByCounter has been implemented for Java bytecode by Michael Kuperberg and Martin Krogmann from the research group "Software Design and Quality"
The work is carried out in the context of the Palladio project led by Prof. Ralf Reussner.

Documentation

Manual (PDF file) and Javadocs incl. a short introduction
Paper: The approach and the Java implementation are described in the paper titled "ByCounter: Portable Runtime Counting of Bytecode Instructions and Method Invocations", you can download the paper (PDF, 213 KB) as well as download the BibTeX entry file (2 KB).

Download

We provide ByCounter to interested parties free of charge, and several researchers have already used ByCounter in their work.
If you want to use ByCounter in your research or work, please email one of the contacts.
We will also provide support for ByCounter, and source code can be made available as well.
URL (after you have requested the password): http://sdqweb.ipd.kit.edu/eclipse/ByCounter/releases/0.9/
Since Version 2.0, ByCounter is also available as eclipse feature from the ByCounter Update Site. An example using anoynmous SVN access is available at [1].

Contact

(Creator) , or see Michael Kuperberg's page.
(Maintainer and Supporter) , or see Henning Groenda's page

Development

A list of restrictions and bug reports are available in the ByCounter JIRA Bugtracker. However, the development version of ByCounter is stable and tested and the list is short.

Users

See The Emergence of Useful Bias in Self-focusing Genetic Programming for Software Optimisation on Brendan Cody-Kenny's publication page at TCD
See Certifying Software Component Performance Specifications on Henning Groenda's publication page at KIT, see TestBasedValidation for information on the available tooling.

Last updated on Friday, June 12, 2015