A scalable technique for characterizing the usage of temporaries in framework-intensive Java applications

Abstract

Framework-intensive applications (e.g., Web applications) heavily use temporary data structures, often resulting in performance bot-tlenecks. This paper presents an optimized blended escape analysis to approximate object lifetimes and thus, to identify these tempo-raries and their uses. Empirical results show that this optimized analysis on average prunes 37 % of the basic blocks in our bench-marks, and achieves a speedup of up to 29 times compared to the original analysis. Newly defined metrics quantify key properties of temporary data structures and their uses. A detailed empirical eval-uation offers the first characterization of temporaries in framework-intensive applications. The results show that temporary data struc-tures can include up to 12 distinct object types and can traverse through as many as 14 method invocations before being captured.