research-article

Compartmental memory management in a modern web browser

Authors:

Christian Wimmer,

Michael FranzAuthors Info & Claims

ISMM '11: Proceedings of the international symposium on Memory management

Pages 119 - 128

https://doi.org/10.1145/1993478.1993496

Published: 04 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Since their inception, the usage pattern of web browsers has changed substantially. Rather than sequentially navigating static web sites, modern web browsers often manage a large number of simultaneous tabs displaying dynamic web content, each of which might be running a substantial amount of client-side JavaScript code. This environment introduced a new degree of parallelism that was not fully embraced by the underlying JavaScript virtual machine architecture. We propose a novel abstraction for multiple disjoint JavaScript heaps, which we call compartments. We use the notion of document origin to cluster objects into separate compartments.

Objects within a compartment can reference each other directly. Objects across compartments can only reference each other through wrappers. Our approach reduces garbage collection pause times by permitting collection of sub-heaps (compartments), and we can use cross-compartment wrappers to enforce cross origin object access policy.

References

[1]

S. M. Blackburn, R. Jones, K. S. McKinley, and J. E. B. Moss. Beltway: getting around garbage collection gridlock. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 153--164. ACM Press, 2002. 10.1145/512529.512548.

Digital Library

[2]

R. S. Cox, S. D. Gribble, H. M. Levy, and J. G. Hansen. A safety-oriented platform for web applications. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pages 350--364. IEEE Computer Society, 2006. 10.1109/SP.2006.4.

Digital Library

[3]

A. Gal, B. Eich, M. Shaver, D. Anderson, D. Mandelin, M. R. Haghighat, B. Kaplan, G. Hoare, B. Zbarsky, J. Orendorff, J. Ruderman, E. W. Smith, R. Reitmaier, M. Bebenita, M. Chang, and M. Franz. Trace-based just-in-time type specialization for dynamic languages. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 465--478. ACM Press, 2009. 10.1145/1542476.1542528.

Digital Library

[4]

C. Grier, S. Tang, and S. T. King. Secure web browsing with the OP web browser. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pages 402--416. IEEE Computer Society, 2008. 10.1109/SP.2008.19.

Digital Library

[5]

D. R. Hanson. Fast allocation and deallocation of memory based on object lifetimes. Software - Practice and Experience, 20 (1): 5--12, 1990. 10.1002/spe.4380200104.

Digital Library

[6]

M. Hirzel. Connectivity-Based Garbage Collection. PhD thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2004.

Digital Library

[7]

M. Hirzel, J. Henkel, A. Diwan, and M. Hind. Understanding the connectivity of heap objects. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Memory Management, pages 36--49. ACM Press, 2002. 10.1145/512429.512435.

Digital Library

[8]

H. Inoue, H. Komatsu, and T. Nakatani. A study of memory management for web-based applications on multicore processors. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 386--396. ACM Press, 2009. 10.1145/1542476.1542520.

Digital Library

[9]

Intel. Using the RDTSC instruction for performance monitoring, 1997.

[10]

R. Jones and R. Lins. Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1996.

Digital Library

[11]

E. Jul, H. Levy, N. Hutchinson, and A. Black. Fine-grained mobility in the Emerald system. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 6 (1): 109--133, 1988. 10.1145/35037.42182.

Digital Library

[12]

N. C. Juul and E. Jul. Comprehensive and robust garbage collection in a distributed system. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Memory Management, pages 103--115. LNCS Volume 637, Springer-Verlag, 1992. 10.1007/BFb0017185.

Digital Library

[13]

D. E. Knuth. Fundamental Algorithms, The Art of Computer Programming, chapter 2, volume 1. Addison Wesley, 2nd edition, 1973.

[14]

S. McFarling. Program optimization for instruction caches. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, pages 183--191. ACM Press, 1989. 10.1145/70082.68200.

Digital Library

[15]

Microsoft. What's new in Internet Explorer 8, 2008. URL http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288472.aspx.

[16]

Mozilla. Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client, 2011 URL http://www.mozilla.com.

[17]

Mozilla. Kraken JavaScript benchmark, 2011. URL http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.org/.

[18]

Mozilla. SpiderMonkey (JavaScript-C) engine, 2011. URL http://www.mozilla.org/js/spidermonkey/.

[19]

J. Peachey, R. Bunt, and C. Colbourn. Some empirical observations on program behavior with applications to program restructuring. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 11 (2): 188--193, 1985. 10.1109/TSE.1985.232193.

Digital Library

[20]

C. Reis and S. D. Gribble. Isolating web programs in modern browser architectures. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Systems, pages 219--232. ACM Press, 2009. 10.1145/1519065.1519090.

Digital Library

[21]

G. Richards, S. Lebresne, B. Burg, and J. Vitek. An analysis of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript programs. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 1--12. ACM Press, 2010. 10.1145/1806596.1806598.

Digital Library

[22]

J. Rudermann. The same origin policy, 2001. URL https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Same_origin_policy_for_JavaScript.

[23]

M. L. Seidl and B. G. Zorn. Segregating heap objects by reference behavior and lifetime. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, pages 12--23. ACM Press, 1998. 10.1145/291069.291012.

Digital Library

[24]

StatCounter. Global Stats, 2011. URL http://gs.statcounter.com/.

[25]

C. J. Stephenson. Fast fits: New methods for dynamic storage allocation. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pages 30--32. ACM Press, 1983. 10.1145/800217.806613.

Digital Library

[26]

H. J. Wang, C. Grier, E. Moshchuk, S. T. King, P. Choudhury, and H. Venter. The multi-principal OS construction of the Gazelle web browser. In Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, pages 417--432. USENIX, 2009.

Digital Library

Cited By

Hsu THoffman KEugster PPayer MWeippl EKatzenbeisser SKruegel CMyers AHalevi S(2016)Enforcing Least Privilege Memory Views for Multithreaded ApplicationsProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/2976749.2978327(393-405)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2976749.2978327
Wagner GLarsen PBrunthaler SFranz M(2016)Thinking Inside the BoxACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/286657638:3(1-37)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2866576
Tran TPelizzi RSekar R(2015)JaTEProceedings of the 31st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference10.1145/2818000.2818019(151-160)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2818000.2818019
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Compartmental memory management in a modern web browser
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Context specific languages
      1. Domain specific languages
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Memory management
        Garbage collection
    2. Software system structures
      1. Software architectures

Recommendations

Compartmental memory management in a modern web browser
ISMM '11

Since their inception, the usage pattern of web browsers has changed substantially. Rather than sequentially navigating static web sites, modern web browsers often manage a large number of simultaneous tabs displaying dynamic web content, each of which ...
Thinking Inside the Box: Compartmentalized Garbage Collection

The web browser is the “new desktop.” Not only do many users spend most of their time using the browser, the browser has also become host to rich and dynamic applications that were previously tailored to each individual operating system. The lingua ...
Isolating web programs in modern browser architectures
EuroSys '09: Proceedings of the 4th ACM European conference on Computer systems

Many of today's web sites contain substantial amounts of client-side code, and consequently, they act more like programs than simple documents. This creates robustness and performance challenges for web browsers. To give users a robust and responsive ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ISMM '11: Proceedings of the international symposium on Memory management

June 2011

148 pages

ISBN:9781450302630

DOI:10.1145/1993478

General Chair:
Hans-J. Boehm
HP Labs
,
Program Chair:
David Bacon
IBM T.J. Watson Research

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 46, Issue 11
ISMM '11
November 2011
135 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/2076022
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 June 2011

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ISMM '11

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

ISMM '11: International Symposium on Memory Management

June 4 - 5, 2011

California, San Jose, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 72 of 156 submissions, 46%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

9
Total Citations
View Citations
573
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)16
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4

Reflects downloads up to 13 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Hsu THoffman KEugster PPayer MWeippl EKatzenbeisser SKruegel CMyers AHalevi S(2016)Enforcing Least Privilege Memory Views for Multithreaded ApplicationsProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/2976749.2978327(393-405)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2976749.2978327
Wagner GLarsen PBrunthaler SFranz M(2016)Thinking Inside the BoxACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/286657638:3(1-37)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2866576
Tran TPelizzi RSekar R(2015)JaTEProceedings of the 31st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference10.1145/2818000.2818019(151-160)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2818000.2818019
Yang EMazières D(2014)Dynamic space limits for HaskellACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2666356.259434149:6(588-598)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2666356.2594341
Yang EMazières DO'Boyle MPingali K(2014)Dynamic space limits for HaskellProceedings of the 35th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/2594291.2594341(588-598)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2594291.2594341
Lerner BBurg BVenter HSchulte WFox A(2011)C3Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX conference on Web application development10.5555/2002168.2002174(6-6)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2002168.2002174
Qiang WGuo JJin HLi W(2017)JSFfox: Run-Timely Confining JavaScript for FirefoxInformation Security and Privacy10.1007/978-3-319-59870-3_8(135-150)Online publication date: 31-May-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59870-3_8
Stefan DYang EMarchenko PRusso AHerman DKarp BMazières DFlinn JLevy H(2014)Protecting users by confining JavaScript with COWLProceedings of the 11th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/2685048.2685060(131-146)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2685048.2685060
Rudafshani MWard PWong BCasimiro AGhandi RAraújo F(2012)MemRedProceedings of the Workshop on Secure and Dependable Middleware for Cloud Monitoring and Management10.1145/2405186.2405192(1-6)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2405186.2405192

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents