Whole program paths

Whole program paths (WPP) are a new approach to capturing and representing a program's dynamic-actually executed-control flow. Unlike other path profi ling techniques, which record intraprocedural:or acyclic paths, WPPs produc e a single, compact description of a program's entire control flow, includi ng loop iteration and interprocedural paths. This paper explains how to collect and represent WPPs. It:also shows how to use WPPs to find hot subpaths, which are the heavily executed sequences of code that should be the focus of performance tuning and compiler optimizat ion.