Software performance modeling plays a crucial role in developing and maintaining software systems. A performance model analytically describes the relationship between the performance of a system and its runtime activities. This process typically examines various aspects of a system’s runtime behavior, such as the execution frequency of functions or methods, to forecast performance metrics like program execution time. By using performance models, developers can predict expected performance and thereby effectively identify and address unexpected performance regressions when actual performance deviates from the model’s predictions. One common and precise method for capturing performance behavior is software tracing, which involves instrumenting the execution of a program, either at the kernel level (e.g., system calls) or application level (e.g., function calls). However, due to the nature of tracing, it can be highly resource-intensive, making it impractical for production environments where resources are limited. In this work, we propose statistical approaches to reduce tracing overhead by identifying and excluding performance-insensitive code regions, particularly application-level functions, from tracing while still building accurate performance models that can capture execution time degradations. We develop both dynamic methods that analyze runtime behavior patterns and static methods that examine code structure to identify performance-sensitive functions. Our methodology specifically targets execution time as the primary performance metric, building models that capture the relationship between function call frequencies and overall program latency. By selecting an optimal set of functions to be traced, we can construct optimized performance models that achieve an R 2 score of up to 99% and, in some cases, outperform full-tracing models (i.e., models using non-optimized tracing data), while significantly reducing the tracing overhead by more than 80% in most cases. Our optimized performance models can also effectively detect performance regressions in our studied programs, demonstrating their usefulness in distinguishing between normal workload variations and actual performance degradations. Finally, our approach is fully automated, making it ready to be used in production environments with minimal human effort.

System tracing has become essential for understanding complex software behavior in modern systems, yet sophisticated trace analysis tools face significant adoption gaps in industrial settings. Through a year-long collaboration with Ericsson Montreal, developing TMLL (Trace-Server Machine Learning Library, now in the Eclipse Foundation), we investigated barriers to trace analysis adoption. Contrary to assumptions about complexity or automation needs, practitioners struggled with translating expert knowledge into actionable insights, integrating analysis into their workflows, and trusting automated results that they could not validate. We identified what we called the Excellence Paradox: technical excellence can actively impede adoption when conflicting with usability, transparency, and practitioner trust. TMLL addresses this through an adoption-focused design that embeds expert knowledge in interfaces, provides transparent explanations, and enables incremental adoption. Validation through Ericsson’s experts’ feedback, Eclipse Foundation’s integration, and a survey of 40 industry and academic professionals revealed consistent patterns: survey results showed that 77.5% prioritize quality and trust in results over technical sophistication, while 67.5% prefer semi-automated analysis with user control, findings supported by qualitative feedback from industrial collaboration and external peer review. Results validate three core principles: cognitive compatibility, embedded expertise, and transparency-based trust. This challenges conventional capability-focused tool development, demonstrating that sustainable adoption requires reorientation toward adoption-focused design with actionable implications for automated software engineering tools.

Performance regressions and improvements are common phenomena in software development, occurring periodically as software evolves and matures. When developers introduce new changes to a program’s codebase, unforeseen performance variations may arise. Identifying these changes at the method level, however, can be challenging due to the complexity and scale of modern codebases. In this work, we present JPerfEvo, a tool designed to automate the evaluation of the method-level performance impact of each code commit (i.e., the performance variations between the two versions before and after a commit). Leveraging the Java Microbenchmark Harness (JMH) module for benchmarking the modified methods, JPerfEvo instruments their execution and applies robust statistical evaluations to detect performance changes. The tool can classify these changes as performance improvements, regressions, or neutral (i.e., no change), with the change magnitude. We evaluated JPerfEvo on three popular and mature open-source Java projects, demonstrating its effectiveness in identifying performance changes throughout their development histories.