School of Computing

Designing a trace format for heap allocation events

Trishul Chilimbi, Richard Jones, and Benjamin Zorn.

In Tony Hosking, editor, ISMM2000 International Symposium on Memory Management, pages 182-196, Minneapolis, MN, October 2000. ACM Press. This is the version of HATF 1.0 and MetaTF 1.0 presented at ISMM2000. Following discussions there, a revised definition has been produced.

Abstract

Dynamic storage allocation continues to play an important role in the performance and correctness of systems ranging from user productivity software to high-performance servers. While algorithms for dynamic storage allocation have been studied for decades, much of the literature is based on measuring the performance of benchmark programs unrepresentative of many important allocation-intensive workloads. Furthermore, to date no standard has emerged or been proposed for publishing and exchanging representative allocation workloads. In this paper, we describe a preliminary design of a trace format for such workloads and investigate its effectiveness at representing large allocation traces. Our proposal allows for a flexible encoding of information in the trace to achieve greater compression. We evaluate our preliminary design in two dimensions. First, we measure how effective these encodings are at reducing trace size. Second we consider how a meta-level specification language could be used to describe such formats and to generate trace readers and writers automatically.

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Bibtex Record

@inproceedings{1128,
author = {Trishul Chilimbi and Richard Jones and Benjamin Zorn.},
title = {Designing a Trace Format for Heap Allocation Events},
month = {October},
year = {2000},
pages = {182-196},
keywords = {determinacy analysis, Craig interpolants},
note = {This is the version of HATF 1.0 and MetaTF 1.0 presented at ISMM2000. Following discussions there, a revised definition has been produced.},
doi = {},
url = {http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2000/1128},
    ISBN = {1-58113-263-8},
    address = {Minneapolis, MN},
    booktitle = {ISMM2000 International Symposium on Memory Management},
    editor = {Tony Hosking},
    publication_type = {inproceedings},
    publisher = {ACM Press.},
    refereed = {yes},
    submission_id = {16716_973166963},
}

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