Title
Marea: An Efficient Application-Level Object Graph Swapper
Abstract
During the execution of object-oriented applications, several millions of objects are created, used and then collected if they are not referenced. Problems appear when objects are unused but cannot be garbage-collected because they are still referenced from other objects. This is an issue because those objects waste primary memory and applications use more primary memory than they actually need. We claim that relying on the operating system's (OS) virtual memory is not always enough since it cannot take into account the domain and structure of applications. At the same time, applications have no easy way to parametrize nor cooperate with memory management. In this paper, we present Marea, an efficient application-level object graph swapper for object-oriented programming languages. Its main goal is to offer the programmer a novel solution to handle application-level memory. Developers can instruct our system to release primary memory by swapping out unused yet referenced objects to secondary memory. Our approach has been qualitatively and quantitatively validated. Our experiments and benchmarks on real-world applications show that Marea can reduce the memory footprint between 23% and 36%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.5381/jot.2013.12.1.a2
JOURNAL OF OBJECT TECHNOLOGY
Keywords
Field
DocType
Object Swapping, Unused objects, Virtual Memory
Programming language,Extended memory,Computer science,Virtual memory,Memory management,Memory map,Overlay,Flat memory model,Memory footprint,Auxiliary memory
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
12
1
1660-1769
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.38
18
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mariano Martinez Peck1172.48
Noury Bouraqadi29418.92
Marcus Denker328523.94
Stéphane Ducasse43418243.15
Luc Fabresse56215.67