On the type accuracy of garbage collection

Hirzel, Martin; Diwan, Amer

doi:10.1145/362422.362428

Cited by 19 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…In our experience, the former is rarely a issue in real-world programs. Prior work has reported that even fully conservative GC rarely suffers from typeaccuracy problems on 64-bit architectures-although more issues have been reported on 32-bit architectures [32]. Other studies confirm that type accuracy is marginal compared to liveness accuracy [33].…”

Section: Mutable Tracingmentioning

confidence: 97%

Mutable checkpoint-restart

Giuffrida

Iorgulescu

Tanenbaum

2014

Proceedings of the 15th International Middleware Conference on - Middleware '14

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The pressing demand to deploy software updates without stopping running programs has fostered much research on live update systems in the past decades. Prior solutions, however, either make strong assumptions on the nature of the update or require extensive and error-prone manual effort, factors which discourage live update adoption.This paper presents Mutable Checkpoint-Restart (MCR), a new live update solution for generic (multiprocess and multithreaded) server programs written in C. Compared to prior solutions, MCR can support arbitrary software updates and automate most of the common live update operations. The key idea is to allow the new version to restart as similarly to a fresh program initialization as possible, relying on existing code paths to automatically restore the old program threads and reinitialize a relevant portion of the program data structures. To transfer the remaining data structures, MCR relies on a combination of precise and conservative garbage collection techniques to trace all the global pointers and apply the required state transformations on the fly. Experimental results on popular server programs (Apache httpd, nginx, OpenSSH and vsftpd ) confirm that our techniques can effectively automate problems previously deemed difficult at the cost of negligible run-time performance overhead (2% on average) and moderate memory overhead (3.9x on average).

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Section: Mutable Tracingmentioning

confidence: 97%

Mutable checkpoint-restart

Giuffrida

Iorgulescu

Tanenbaum

2014

Proceedings of the 15th International Middleware Conference on - Middleware '14

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“…As Hirzel et al [12,13] show, the quality of the results of a reachability-based leak detector largely depends on the type and liveness accuracy of its reachability traversal. They find that the liveness accuracy is more important.…”

Section: Memory Leak Detectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Low-overhead memory leak detection using adaptive statistical profiling

Hauswirth¹,

Chilimbi

2004

SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev.

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Sampling has been successfully used to identify performance optimization opportunities. We would like to apply similar techniques to check program correctness. Unfortunately, sampling provides poor coverage of infrequently executed code, where bugs often lurk. We describe an adaptive profiling scheme that addresses this by sampling executions of code segments at a rate inversely proportional to their execution frequency.To validate our ideas, we have implemented SWAT, a novel memory leak detection tool. SWAT traces program allocations/ frees to construct a heap model and uses our adaptive profiling infrastructure to monitor loads/stores to these objects with low overhead. SWAT reports 'stale' objects that have not been accessed for a 'long' time as leaks. This allows it to find all leaks that manifest during the current program execution. Since SWAT has low runtime overhead (< 5%), and low space overhead (< 10% in most cases and often less than 5%), it can be used to track leaks in production code that take days to manifest. In addition to identifying the allocations that leak memory, SWAT exposes where the program last accessed the leaked data, which facilitates debugging and fixing the leak. SWAT has been used by several product groups at Microsoft for the past 18 months and has proved effective at detecting leaks with a low false positive rate (<10%).

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“…Empirically, this occasionally has some eft~ct on space usage, but this aft~ct is rarely catastrophic [8,4]. The large majority of applications behave pert~ctly well with a conservative garbage collector.…”

Section: Conveniencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…That issue is addressed well by [8]. ~V~ would instead like to address the concern that a conservatively collected program may unexpectedly retain large amounts of memory due to a particularly unfortunate misidentified pointer, which did not arise during testing.…”

Section: Conveniencementioning

confidence: 99%

Bounding space usage of conservative garbage collectors

Boehm

2002

Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

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Conservative garbage collectors can automatically reclaim unused memory in the absence of precise pointer location intbrmation. If a location can possibly contain a pointer, it is treated by the collector as though it contained a pointer. Although it is commonly assumed that this can lead to unbounded space use due to misidentified pointers, such extreme space use is rarely observed in practice, and then generally only if the number of misidentified pointers is itself unbounded.~V~ show that if the program manipulates only data structures satis[ving a simple GC-rvbustr~ess criterion, then a bounded number of misidentified pointers can at most result in increasing space usage by a constant factor. ~V~ argue that nearly all common data structures are already GCrobust, and it is typically easy to identi[v and replace those that are not. Thus it becomes f~asible to prove space bounds on programs collected by mildly conservative garbage collectors, such as the one in [2]. The worst-case space overhead introduced by such mild conservatism is comparable to the worst-case fi'agmentation overhead for inherent in any nonmoving storage allocator. The same GC-robustness criterion also ensures the absence of temporary space leaks of the kind discussed in [13] for generational garbage collectors.

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On the type accuracy of garbage collection

Cited by 19 publications

References 15 publications

Mutable checkpoint-restart

Mutable checkpoint-restart

Low-overhead memory leak detection using adaptive statistical profiling

Bounding space usage of conservative garbage collectors

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