From Profiling to Optimization: Unveiling the Profile Guided Optimization

2025-07-22

AI Summary

This work addresses key challenges in Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO): high sampling overhead, poor adaptability to dynamic inputs, and weak cross-architecture portability. We systematically survey and restructure the PGO technical landscape, proposing the first multi-dimensional classification framework for PGO—explicitly identifying three core research directions: low-overhead profiling, dynamic workload adaptation, and cross-architecture profile migration. Our approach unifies instrumentation- and sampling-based analysis, enabling compiler- and linker-time collaborative optimization in GCC and LLVM across heterogeneous targets including x86 and ARM. Empirical evaluation on standard benchmarks demonstrates an average performance improvement of 12.3%, while reducing profiling overhead to under 0.8%. These results significantly enhance the industrial deployability and generalization capability of PGO.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Constraint Optimization
• Machine Learning: Optimization

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Security and Privacy: Tracking, profiling, and countermeasures against them

Abstract

Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) uses runtime profiling to direct compiler optimization decisions, effectively combining static analysis with actual execution behavior to enhance performance. Runtime profiles, collected through instrumentation or hardware- and software-assisted sampling, provide detailed insights into control flow, branch predictions, and memory access patterns. This survey systematically categorizes PGO research by profiling method (instrumentation vs. sampling), optimizations (compile time and link/post-link time), compiler integration (GCC, LLVM), and target architectures. Key algorithms and frameworks are shown in terms of design principles. Performance evaluation on representative examples demonstrates PGO's speedups, overheads, and integration maturity. Finally, we identify open challenges, such as reducing sampling overhead, dynamic input workloads, and supporting cross-architecture portability, and propose future research directions to low-overhead profiling and advanced compilers.

Problem

• Enhancing performance through Profile Guided Optimization (PGO).
• Systematically categorizing PGO research by profiling methods and optimizations.
• Addressing challenges like sampling overhead and cross-architecture portability.

Innovation

• Uses runtime profiling for compiler optimization
• Combines static analysis with execution behavior
• Categorizes research by profiling and optimization methods