Towards eBPF Overhead Quantification: An Exemplary Comparison of eBPF and SystemTap

Quantifying the performance overhead of instrumentation tools is crucial to maximize their effectiveness in performance analysis and monitoring. This paper presents a methodology for precisely measuring the overhead introduced by eBPF and SystemTap, two prominent tools for dynamic instrumentation. We employ a fixed-time benchmark approach, that targets common system call functions (open and mmap) with various probe types, to isolate and quantify the overhead under controlled conditions. Our results demonstrate that both eBPF and SystemTap impose measurable overhead, with user-space probes being the most expensive. Furthermore, we find that data transfer significantly impacts SystemTap's performance, while eBPF remains relatively unaffected. Our findings, validated by comparison with ftrace and internal eBPF statistics, provide valuable insights for informed decision-making when applying instrumentation. The presented methodology offers a robust, repeatable and reproducible approach for quantifying instrumentation overhead that can be applied to any target system.