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Measuring the performance of interactive applications with listener latency profiling

Published: 09 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

When Java developers need to improve the performance of their applications, they usually use one of the many existing profilers for Java. These profilers generally capture a profile that represents the execution time spent in each method. The developer can thus focus her optimization efforts on the methods that consume the most time. In this paper we argue that this type of profile is insufficient for tuning interactive applications. Interactive applications respond to user events, such as mouse clicks and key presses. The perceived performance of interactive applications is directly related to the response time of the program.
In this paper we present listener latency profiling, a profiling approach with two distinctive characteristics. First, we call it latency profiling because it helps developers to find long latency operations. Second, we call it listener profiling because it abstracts away from method-level profiles to compute the latency of the various listeners. This allows a developer to reason about performance with respect to listeners, also called observers, the high level abstraction at the core of any interactive Java application.
We present our listener latency profiling approach, describe LiLa, our implementation, validate it on a set of micro-benchmarks, and evaluate it on a complex real-world interactive application.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
PPPJ '08: Proceedings of the 6th international symposium on Principles and practice of programming in Java
September 2008
198 pages
ISBN:9781605582238
DOI:10.1145/1411732
  • Conference Chairs:
  • Luis Veiga,
  • Vasco Amaral
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 09 September 2008

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Author Tags

  1. GUI
  2. latency
  3. listeners
  4. profiling

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Cited By

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  • (2021)Benchmarking and learning garbage collection delays for resource‐restricted graphical user interfacesSoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.300552:1(172-193)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2021
  • (2020)Performance Evaluation of Graphical User Interfaces in Java and C#2020 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSASE)10.1109/CSASE48920.2020.9142075(290-295)Online publication date: Apr-2020
  • (2018)Garbage Collections Delays on Java GUIs2018 Eleventh International Conference on Mobile Computing and Ubiquitous Network (ICMU)10.23919/ICMU.2018.8653592(1-6)Online publication date: Oct-2018
  • (2018)Balancing parallelization and asynchronization in event‐driven programs with OpenMPConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.495931:4Online publication date: 21-Sep-2018
  • (2017)Accurate reification of complete supertype information for dynamic analysis on the JVMACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3170492.313606152:12(104-116)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2017
  • (2017)Accurate reification of complete supertype information for dynamic analysis on the JVMProceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences10.1145/3136040.3136061(104-116)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2017
  • (2014)Network latency hiding in thin client systems through server-centric speculative display updatingJournal of Network and Computer Applications10.1016/j.jnca.2013.12.00341(228-239)Online publication date: May-2014
  • (2014)Platform for real-time subjective assessment of interactive multimedia applicationsMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-013-1395-y72:1(749-775)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2014
  • (2013)Event-driven asynchronous method calls with the D-Bus message systemSoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.221645:1(53-74)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2013
  • (2011)Catch me if you canACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2076021.204808146:10(155-170)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2011
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