Memory Leak Visualization Using Evolving Software Cities
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Buchtitel:
Proceedings 10th Symposium on Software Performance (SSP 2019)
Original Kurzfassung:
Memory leaks occur when no longer needed objects
are unnecessarily kept alive. They can have a significant performance impact, possibly leading to a crash
of the application in the worst case.
Most state-of-the-art memory monitoring tools lack
visualizations of memory growth over time. However,
domains such as software evolution and program comprehension have shown that graphically visualizing
the growth and evolution of a system can help users
in understanding and interpreting this growth.
In this paper, we present ongoing research on how
to visualize an application?s memory evolution over
time using the software city metaphor. While software cities are typically used to visualize static artifacts of a software system such as classes, we use them
to visualize the dynamic memory behavior of an application. In our approach, heap objects can be grouped
by arbitrary properties such as their types or their allocating threads. These groups are visualized as buildings arranged in districts, where the size of a building
corresponds to the number of objects it represents.
Continuously updating the city over time creates the
feeling of an evolving city. Users can then identify and
inspect those buildings, i.e., object groups, that grow
the most.
We integrated our approach into AntTracks,
a trace-based memory monitoring tool developed by
us, to prove its feasibility