Fine-Grained Performance Evaluation and Monitoring Using Aspects - A Case Study on the Development of Data Mining Techniques

This paper illustrates how aspect-oriented programming techniques support some tasks whose implementation using conventional object-oriented programming would be extremely time-consuming and error-prone. In particular, we have successfully employed aspects to evaluate and monitor the I/O performance of alternative data mining techniques. Without having to modify the source code of the system under analysis, aspects provide an unintrusive mechanism to perform this kind of performance analysis. In fact, aspects let us probe a system implementation so that we can identify potential bottlenecks, detect redundant computations, and characterize system behavior.