A Detection and Measurement Approach for Memory Leaked Objects in Java Programs

Abstract

SUMMARYMemory leak occurs when useless objects cannot be released for a long time during program execution. Memory leaked objects may cause memory overflow, system performance degradation and even cause the system to crash when they become serious. This paper presents a dynamic approach for detecting and measuring memory leaked objects in Java programs. First, our approach tracks the program by JDI and records heap information to find out the potentially leaked objects. Second, we present memory leaking confidence to measure the influence of these objects on the program. Finally, we select three open-source programs to evaluate the efficiency of our approach. Furthermore, we choose ten programs from DaCapo 9.12 benchmark suite to reveal the time overhead of our approach. The experimental results show that our approach is able to detect and measure memory leaked objects efficiently. key words: memory leak, heap information, leaked objects, memory leaking confidence