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The causes of bloat, the limits of health

Published: 21 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Applications often have large runtime memory requirements. In some cases, large memory footprint helps accomplish an important functional, performance, or engineering requirement. A large cache,for example, may ameliorate a pernicious performance problem. In general, however, finding a good balance between memory consumption and other requirements is quite challenging. To do so, the development team must distinguish effective from excessive use of memory.
We introduce health signatures to enable these distinctions. Using data from dozens of applications and benchmarks, we show that they provide concise and application-neutral summaries of footprint. We show how to use them to form value judgments about whether a design or implementation choice is good or bad. We show how being independent ofany application eases comparison across disparate implementations. We demonstrate the asymptotic nature of memory health: certain designsare limited in the health they can achieve, no matter how much the data size scales up. Finally, we show how to use health signatures to automatically generate formulas that predict this asymptotic behavior, and show how they enable powerful limit studies on memory health.

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  • (2023)Decker: Attack Surface Reduction via On-Demand Code MappingProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 210.1145/3575693.3575734(192-206)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2023
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
OOPSLA '07: Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications
October 2007
728 pages
ISBN:9781595937865
DOI:10.1145/1297027
  • cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
    ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 42, Issue 10
    Proceedings of the 2007 OOPSLA conference
    October 2007
    686 pages
    ISSN:0362-1340
    EISSN:1558-1160
    DOI:10.1145/1297105
    Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 21 October 2007

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Author Tags

  1. bloat
  2. limit studies
  3. memory footprint
  4. metrics

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OOPSLA '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 33 of 156 submissions, 21%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,244 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Asking and Answering Questions During Memory ProfilingIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.337712750:5(1096-1117)Online publication date: May-2024
  • (2023)DJXPerf: Identifying Memory Inefficiencies via Object-Centric Profiling for JavaProceedings of the 21st ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1145/3579990.3580010(81-94)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Decker: Attack Surface Reduction via On-Demand Code MappingProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 210.1145/3575693.3575734(192-206)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2023
  • (2022)Prioritising test scripts for the testing of memory bloat in web applicationsIET Software10.1049/sfw2.1205716:3(317-330)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2022
  • (2020)SemeruProceedings of the 14th USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3488766.3488781(261-280)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2020
  • (2020)Evaluating an Interactive Memory Analysis Tool: Findings from a Cognitive Walkthrough and a User StudyProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33949774:EICS(1-37)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2020
  • (2020)BlankIt library debloating: getting what you want instead of cutting what you don’tProceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3385412.3386017(164-180)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2020
  • (2020)JShrink: in-depth investigation into debloating modern Java applicationsProceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3368089.3409738(135-146)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2020
  • (2020)Memory Cities: Visualizing Heap Memory Evolution Using the Software City Metaphor2020 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)10.1109/VISSOFT51673.2020.00017(110-121)Online publication date: Sep-2020
  • (2019)Detection of suspicious time windows in memory monitoringProceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3357390.3361025(95-104)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2019
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