Visualizing Dynamic Call Graphs

Abstract

Visualizing time-varying call graphs is challenging due to vast amounts of data at many dimensions to be displayed: Hierarchically organized vertices with attributes, directed or undirected edges with weights, and time. In this paper, we introduce a novel overview representation that shows dynamic graphs as a timeline- and pixelbased aggregated view targeting the preservation of a viewer's mental map by encoding the time-varying data into a static diagram. This view allows comparisons of dynamic call graphs on different levels of hierarchical granularity. Our data extraction and visualization system uses this overview as a starting point for further investigations by applying existing dynamic graph visualization techniques that show the graph structures and properties more clearly. These more task-specific visualizations show the dynamic graph data from different perspectives such as curved node-link diagrams or glyph-based representations combined by linking and brushing. Intermediate analysis steps can be stored and rebuilt at any time by using corresponding thumbnail representations.