Bell: bit-encoding online memory leak detection

Memory leaks compromise availability and security by crippling performance and crashing programs. Leaks are difficult to diagnose because they have no immediate symptoms. Online leak detection tools benefit from storing and reporting per-object sites (e.g., allocation sites) for potentially leaking objects. In programs with many small objects, per-object sites add high space overhead, limiting their use in production environments. This paper introduces Bit-Encoding Leak Location (Bell), a statistical approach that encodes per-object sites to a single bit per object. A bit loses information about a site, but given sufficient objects that use the site and a known, finite set of possible sites, Bell uses brute-force decoding to recover the site with high accuracy. We use this approach to encode object allocation and last-use sites in Sleigh, a new leak detection tool. Sleigh detects stale objects (objects unused for a long time) and uses Bell decoding to report their allocation and l...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Michael D. Bond, Kathryn S. McKinley
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2006, Leak, Leak Detection, Per-object Sites, Programming Languages