I/O profiling Maven Junit Tests with strace

by Martin Monperrus

Recently I wanted to know what are the files read and written by each test in Spoon. Here is what I managed to do it by using strace.

Profiling a single test

Profiling one single test:

  strace  -f -s 500 -o trace.txt mvn surefire:test -D test=spoon.test.annotation.AnnotationTest

(the -f tells strace to also trace forks, it is required because Maven surefire forks the JVM; the -s is required to get the actual file paths which are usually longer than the default 32 characters).

If you want to only focus on write operations:

  strace  -f -s 500 -o trace.txt mvn surefire:test -D test=spoon.test.annotation.AnnotationTest  | egrep "O_RDWR|O_CREAT"

Profiling all tests at once

First run all tests to get a list of tests in target/surefire-reports.

  mvn clean test

Then you can iterate over each test in a separate mvn call as follows:

  for test in target/surefire-reports/*txt; 
  do 
     strace -f -s 500 -o $test.trace  mvn surefire:test -Dtest=$(basename $test .txt); 
  done

For each test, you obtain a trace file in target/surefire-reports/, for instance target/surefire-reports/spoon.test.annotation.AnnotationTest.txt.trace.

Afterwards you can write a script to analyze the content of trace files.

–Martin
Lille, November 2016

Tagged as: