A runtime approach for estimating resource usage

Abstract

In the era of information explosion, a program is necessary to be scalable. Therefore, scalability analysis becomes very important in software verification and validation. However, current approaches to empirical scalability analysis remain limitations related to the number of supported models and performance. In this paper, we propose a runtime approach for estimating the program resource usage with two aims: evaluating the program scalability and revealing potential errors. In this approach, the resource usage of a program is first observed when it is executed on inputs with different scales, the observed results are then fitted on a model of the usage according to the program's input. Comparing to other approaches, ours supports diverse models to illustrate the resource usage, i.e., linear-log, power-law, polynomial, etc. We currently focus on the computation cost and stack frames usage as two representatives of resource usage, but the approach can be extended to other kinds of resource. The experimental result shows that our approach achieves more precise estimation and better performance than other state-of-the-art approaches.