A stream application receives a stream of tuples to be processed by a plurality of processing elements operating on one or more compute nodes. Each processing element has one or more stream operators. The stream application assigns one or more processing cycles to one or more segments of software code. The segments of software code are embedded in one or more tuples of the stream of tuples. The stream application determines that a condition is met based on the processing cycles. The stream application performs an operation based on the processing cycles.