Performance bugs are non-functional defects that can significantly reduce the performance of an application (e.g., software hanging or freezing) and lead to poor user experience. Prior studies found that each type of performance bugs follows a unique code-based performance anti-pattern and proposed different approaches to detect such anti-patterns by analyzing the source code of a program. However, each approach can only recognize one performance anti-pattern. Different approaches need to be applied separately to identify different performance anti-patterns. To predict a large variety of performance bug types using a unified approach, we propose an approach that predicts performance bugs by leveraging various historical data (e.g., source code and code change history). We collect performance bugs from 80 popular Java projects. Next, we propose performance code metrics to capture the code characteristics of performance bugs. We build performance bug predictors using machine learning models, such as Random Forest, eXtreme Gradient Boosting, and Linear Regressions. We observe that: (1) Random Forest and eXtreme Gradient Boosting are the best algorithms for predicting performance bugs at a file level with a median of 0.84 AUC, 0.21 PR-AUC, and 0.38 MCC; (2) The proposed performance code metrics have the most significant impact on the performance of our models compared to code and process metrics. In particular, the median AUC, PR-AUC, and MCC of the studied machine learning models drop by 7.7%, 25.4%, and 20.2% without using the proposed performance code metrics; and (3) Our approach can predict additional performance bugs that are not covered by the anti-patterns proposed in the prior studies.

High performance is a critical factor to achieve and maintain the success of a software system. Performance anomalies represent the performance degradation issues (e.g., slowing down in system response times) of software systems at run-time. Performance anomalies can cause a dramatically negative impact on users’ satisfaction. Prior studies propose different approaches to detect anomalies by analyzing execution logs and resource utilization metrics after the anomalies have happened. However, the prior detection approaches cannot predict the anomalies ahead of time; such limitation causes an inevitable delay in taking corrective actions to prevent performance anomalies from happening. We propose an approach that can predict performance anomalies in software systems and raise anomaly warnings in advance. Our approach uses a Long-Short Term Memory neural network to capture the normal behaviors of a software system. Then, our approach predicts performance anomalies by identifying the early deviations from the captured normal system behaviors. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our approach using two real-world software systems (i.e., Elasticsearch and Hadoop). We compare the performance of our approach with two baselines. The first baseline is one state-to-the-art baseline called Unsupervised Behavior Learning. The second baseline predicts performance anomalies by checking if the resource utilization exceeds pre-defined thresholds. Our results show that our approach can predict various performance anomalies with high precision (i.e., 97–100%) and recall (i.e., 80–100%), while the baselines achieve 25–97% precision and 93–100% recall. For a range of performance anomalies, our approach can achieve sufficient lead times that vary from 20 to 1,403 s (i.e., 23.4 min). We also demonstrate the ability of our approach to predict the performance anomalies that are caused by real-world performance bugs. For predicting performance anomalies that are caused by real-world performance bugs, our approach achieves 95–100% precision and 87–100% recall, while the baselines achieve 49–83% precision and 100% recall. The obtained results show that our approach outperforms the existing anomaly prediction approaches and is able to predict performance anomalies in real-world systems.