Advanced Java bytecode instrumentation

Abstract

Bytecode instrumentation is a valuable technique for transparently enhancing virtual execution environments for purposes such as monitoring or profiling. Current approaches to bytecode instrumentation either exclude some methods from instrumentation, severely restrict the ways certain methods may be instrumented, or require the use of native code. In this paper we compare different approaches to bytecode instrumentation in Java and come up with a novel instrumentation framework that goes beyond the aforementioned limitations. We evaluate our approach with an instrumentation for profiling which generates calling context trees of various platform-independent dynamic metrics.