Runtime Monitoring on a Real-Time Embedded System

Abstract: Understanding runtime behavior in a real-time system may be difficult, as tools such as performance profilers and powerful debugging tools like those present in traditional personal computers may be unavailable, and computational resources can be limited for recording the runtime. Few of today's published literature evaluates the usability of runtime visualizations, and therefore this study will present solutions on how to create understandable runtime visualization. This study further evaluates one solution, conducting usability tests and performance tests on the solution. The solution proved to be effective in helping users understand runtime execution during the usability tests. Recording the runtime proved to adversely affect performance on the tested systems during the performance tests. Multiple methods of recording runtime were tested which all affected the performance. This performance impact was concluded to be insignificant in over 90% of normal use-cases, but programs that loaded the system heavily was significant. Most programs with heavy loads will see a relatively small but noticeable performance impact, while in some extreme cases, the execution times can increase by over 30% while recording the runtime.