Improving the Testing of Java Garbage Collection Through an Efficient Benchmark Generation

Abstract

Garbage Collection (GC) is a core feature of multiple modern technologies (e.g., Java, Android). On one hand, it offers significant software engineering benefits over explicitly memory management, like preventing most types of memory leaks. On the other hand, GC is a known cause of performance degradation. However, it is considerably challenging to understand its exact impact on the overall application performance. This is because the non-deterministic nature of GC makes very complex to properly model it and evaluate its performance impacts. To help tackling these problems, we present an engine to generate realistic GC benchmarks by enabling to effectively capture the GC/memory behaviours experienced by real-world Java applications. We also demonstrate, through a comprehensive experimental evaluation, how such benchmarks can be useful to strengthen the evaluation of GC-related advancements.