In-The-Field Monitoring of Functional Calls: Is It Feasible?
This addresses the problem of balancing data collection for debugging and profiling with user annoyance in software development, though it is incremental in focusing on user perception rather than overhead alone.
The paper investigates whether monitoring function calls in software applications can impact user experience, finding that users can tolerate non-trivial overhead depending on the operation and context.
Collecting data about the sequences of function calls executed by an application while running in the field can be useful to a number of applications, including failure reproduction, profiling, and debugging. Unfortunately, collecting data from the field may introduce annoying slowdowns that negatively affect the quality of the user experience. So far, the impact of monitoring has been mainly studied in terms of the overhead that it may introduce in the monitored applications, rather than considering if the introduced overhead can be really recognized by users. In this paper we take a different perspective studying to what extent collecting data about sequences of function calls may impact the quality of the user experience, producing recognizable effects. Interestingly we found that, depending on the nature of the executed operation and its execution context, users may tolerate a non-trivial overhead. This information can be potentially exploited to collect significant amount of data without annoying users.