LeakSurvivor: Towards Safely Tolerating Memory Leaks for Garbage-Collected Languages

Continuous memory leaks severely hurt program performance and software availability for garbage-collected programs. This paper presents a safe method, called LeakSurvivor, to tolerate continuous memory leaks at runtime for garbage-collected programs. Our main idea is to periodically swap out the "Potentially Leaked" (PL) memory objects identified by leak detectors from the virtual memory to disks. As a result, the virtual memory space occupied by the PL objects can be reclaimed by garbage collectors and available for future uses. If a swapped-out PL object is accesses later, LeakSurvivor will restore it from disks to the memory for correct program execution. Furthermore, LeakSurvivor helps developers to prune false positives. We have built the prototype of LeakSurvivor on top of Jikes RVM 2.4.2, a high performance Java-in-Java virtual machine developed by IBM. We conduct the experiments with three Java applications including Eclipse, SPECjbb2000 and Jigsaw. Among them, Eclip...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: USENIX
• Authors: Yan Tang, Qi Gao, Feng Qin
• Keywords: Continuous Memory Leaks, Memory Leaks, Operating System, USENIX 2008, Virtual Memory