SIGPLAN

Garbage collection is widely used and has largely been a boon for programmer productivity. However, traditional garbage collection is approaching both practical and theoretical performance limits. In practice, the maximum heap size and heap structure of ...

Mark-compact garbage collection helps long-running programs avoid fragmentation. The Lisp2 mark-compact collector is a classic but still widely-used compaction algorithm. It sequentially scans the entire heap to compact all live objects at one end of ...

We propose a new, principled approach to adaptive heap sizing based on control theory. We review current state-of-the-art heap sizing mechanisms, as deployed in Jikes RVM and HotSpot. We then formulate heap sizing as a control problem, apply and tune a ...

As caches become larger and shared by an increasing number of cores, cache management is becoming more important. This paper explores collaborative caching, which uses software hints to influence hardware caching. Recent studies have shown that such ...

We present a new approach for constructing debuggers based on declarative specification of bug conditions and root causes, and automatic generation of debugger code. We illustrate our approach on several classes of bugs, memory or otherwise. For each ...

Experimental evaluation is key to systems research. Because modern systems are complex and non-deterministic, good experimental methodology demands that researchers account for uncertainty. To obtain valid results, they are expected to run many ...

We present ACDC, an open-source benchmark that may be configured to emulate explicit single- and multi-threaded memory allocation, sharing, access, and deallocation behavior to expose virtually any relevant allocator performance differences. ACDC mimics ...

In this paper, we propose a novel method for context-sensitive pointer analysis using the value flow graph (VFG) formulation. We achieve context-sensitivity by simultaneously applying function cloning and computing context-free language reachability (...

Programs written in multiple languages are known as polyglot programs. In part due to the proliferation of new and productive high-level programming languages, these programs are becoming more common in environments that must interoperate with existing ...

We present Elephant Tracks (ET), a dynamic program analysis tool for Java that produces detailed traces of garbage collection-related events, including object allocations, object deaths, and pointer updates. Like prior work, our tracing tool is based on ...

Over the past decade, the increasing demands on data-driven business intelligence have led to the proliferation of large-scale, data-intensive applications that often have huge amounts of data (often at terabyte or petabyte scale) to process. An object-...