Detecting Inefficiently-Used Containers to Avoid Bloat

Runtime bloat degrades significantly the performance and scalability of software systems. An important source of bloat is the inefficient use of containers. It is expensive to create inefficiently-used containers and to invoke their associated methods, as this may ultimately execute large volumes of code, with call stacks dozens deep, and allocate many temporary objects. This paper presents practical static and dynamic tools that can find inappropriate use of containers in Java programs. At the core of these tools is a base static analysis that identifies, for each container, the objects that are added to this container and the key statements (i.e., heap loads and stores) that achieve the semantics of common container operations such as ADD and GET. The static tool finds problematic uses of containers by considering the nesting relationships among the loops where these semantics-achieving statements are located, while the dynamic tool can instrument these statements and find inefficie...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Guoqing Xu, Atanas Rountev
• Keywords: Containers, PLDI 2010, Programming Languages, Runtime Bloat Degrades, Static Tool