Garbology: a study of how Java objects die

Abstract

In this paper we present a study of how Java programs dispose of objects. Unlike prior work on object demographics and lifetime patterns, our goal is to precisely characterize the actions that cause objects to become unreachable. We use a recently-developed tracing tool, called Elephant Tracks, which can localize object deaths within a specific method and tell us the proximal cause. Our analysis centers around garbage clusters: groups of connected objects that become unreachable at precisely the same time due to a single program action. We classify these clusters using traditional features, such as size, allocation site, and lifetime, and using new ones, such as death site and cause of death. We then use this knowledge about garbage clusters in a new GC algorithm: the Cluster Aware Garbage Collection (CAGC) algorithm.