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Designing a Trace Format for Heap Allocation Events

Chilimbi, Trishul, Jones, Richard E., Zorn., Benjamin (2001) Designing a Trace Format for Heap Allocation Events. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 36 (1). pp. 35-49. ISSN 0362-1340. E-ISSN 1558-1160. (doi:10.1145/362426.362435) (KAR id:21946)

Abstract

Dynamic storage allocation continues to play an important role in the performance and correctness of systems ranging from user productivity software to high-performance servers. While algorithms for dynamic storage allocation have been studied for decades, much of the literature is based on measuring the performance of benchmark programs unrepresentative of many important allocation-intensive workloads. Furthermore, to date no standard has emerged or been proposed for publishing and exchanging representative allocation workloads. In this paper, we describe a preliminary design of a trace format for such workloads and investigate its effectiveness at representing large allocation traces. Our proposal allows for a flexible encoding of information in the trace to achieve greater compression. We evaluate our preliminary design in two dimensions. First, we measure how effective these encodings are at reducing trace size. Second we consider how a meta-level specification language could be used to describe such formats and to generate trace readers and writers automatically.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1145/362426.362435
Additional information: This is the version of HATF 1.0 and MetaTF 1.0 presented at ISMM2000. Following discussions there, a revised definition has been produced.
Uncontrolled keywords: memory management, garbage collection, event trace
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics (inc Computing science) > QA 76 Software, computer programming,
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Richard Jones
Date Deposited: 13 Sep 2009 16:29 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:00 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/21946 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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