SUMMARYPlatforms with automatic memory management, such as the JVM, are usually considered free of memory leaks. However, memory leaks can happen in such environments, as the garbage collector cannot free objects, which are not used by the application anymore, but are still referenced. Such unused objects can eventually fill up the heap and crash the application. Although this problem has been studied extensively, nevertheless, there are still many rooms for improvement in this area. This paper describes the statistical approach for memory leak detection, as an alternative, along with a commercial tool, Plumbr, which is based on the method. The tool is later analyzed with three case studies of real applications and in the process also analyzes strengths and weaknesses of the statistical approach for memory leak detection.
Memory leaks are major problems in all kinds of applications, depleting their performance, even if they run on platforms with automatic memory management, such as Java Virtual Machine. In addition, memory leaks contribute to software aging, increasing the complexity of software maintenance. So far memory leak detection was considered to be a part of development process, rather than part of software maintenance. To detect slow memory leaks as a part of quality assurance process or in production environments statistical approach for memory leak detection was implemented and deployed in a commercial tool called Plumbr. It showed promising results in terms of leak detection precision and recall, however, even better detection quality was desired. To achieve this improvement goal, classification algorithms were applied to the statistical data, which was gathered from customer environments where Plumbr was deployed. This paper presents the challenges which had to be solved, method that was used to generate features for supervised learning and the results of the corresponding experiments.
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