Object ownership profiling

Derek Rayside, Lucy Mendel
2007 Proceedings of the twenty-second IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering - ASE '07  
We introduce object ownership profiling, a technique for finding and fixing memory leaks in object-oriented programs. Object ownership profiling is the first memory profiling technique that reports both a hierarchy of allocated objects along with size and time information aggregated up that hierarchy. In addition, it reveals the cross-hierarchy interactions that are essential to pinpointing the source of a leak. We identify five memory management anti-patterns, including two that involve rich
more » ... ap structure and object interactions, and are novel contributions of this work. We apply object ownership profiling to find and fix memory leaks in the Alloy IDE v3 that users had complained about for years, and that had eluded detection by code reviews and type-based commercial memory profilers.
doi:10.1145/1321631.1321661 dblp:conf/kbse/RaysideM07 fatcat:nxoxcev4cra4hebfke3tbbkya4