Measuring by the kernel the amount of time a monitored thread spends in a queue in order to monitor scheduler delays in a computing device

A computing device comprising:

• a control unit having one or more hardware-based microprocessors;
• and
• an operating system executable by the microprocessors to provide an operating environment for a user software application,
• wherein the operating system comprises a scheduler module and a monitoring module executing within a kernel space of the operating system,
• wherein the monitoring module stores a flag associated with a monitored thread that causes the operating system to determine an amount of time that the monitored thread is stored on a queue, wherein the queue is at least one of a run queue or a sleep queue, wherein the queue stores a plurality of threads scheduled by the operating system for execution, the plurality of threads comprising the monitored thread and at least one thread that is not monitored;
• wherein the scheduler module inserts the monitored thread of the user software application into the queue comprising the plurality of threads and records an insertion time that the monitored thread was inserted into the queue;
• wherein the scheduler module of the operating system detects an event to remove the monitored thread from the queue;
• wherein, responsive to detecting the event, the scheduler module of the operating system removes the monitored thread from the queue;
• wherein, responsive to the scheduler module removing the monitored thread, the monitoring module of the operating system determines an amount of time that the monitored thread is stored on the queue based on the insertion time and a removal time at which the monitored thread was removed from the queue, wherein determining the amount of time comprises computing the amount of time to exclude time associated with system events comprising interrupts and memory allocations, from the amount of time the monitored thread is on the queue;
• and
• wherein when the amount of time the monitored thread is stored on the queue is greater than or equal to a performance threshold, the monitoring module sends a notification to a notification listener to indicate a potential performance problem within the computing device.

A system comprising:

• an operating system;
• a software resource;
• and
• a control unit having one or more hardware-based microprocessors configured to execute the operating system wherein:
• an application programming interface (API) of the operating system is configured to receive an event from the software resource that indicates the software resource includes a monitored thread;
• a monitoring module of the operating system that is configured to:
• responsive to receiving the event via the API, store a flag associated with the monitored thread that causes the operating system to determine an amount of time that the monitored thread is stored on a queue, wherein the queue is at least one of a run queue or a sleep queue, wherein the queue stores a plurality of threads scheduled by the operating system for execution, the plurality of threads comprising the monitored thread and at least one thread that is not monitored;
• responsive to removing the monitored thread from the queue, determine an amount of time that the monitored thread is stored on the queue based on an insertion time that the monitored thread is inserted into the queue and a removal time at which the monitored thread was removed from the queue, wherein determining the amount of time comprises computing the amount of time to exclude time associated with system events comprising interrupts and memory allocations, from the amount of time the monitored thread is on the queue;
• and
• send a notification to a notification listener, to indicate a potential performance problem within the computing device, when the amount of time the monitored thread is stored on the queue is greater than or equal to a performance threshold.