A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document of the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
The invention is generally related to virtual machine and run-time environments, and particularly to a system and method for detecting memory leaks in a garbage collected environment.
In an application server or run-time environment which includes a virtual machine, for example the Java Virtual Machine from Sun Microsystems or the JRockit Virtual Machine from Bea Systems, Inc., resources are constantly being created and used to service client and server requests. The typical virtual machine (VM) environment exists on a server that includes an operating system and memory space. As the VM executes, servicing client requests and running applications, it creates object instances in the memory of the VM or server. As the system operates this memory space is continuously used up with new objects and other resources. The typical VM environment includes a garbage collection mechanism that is used to clean up the memory space and to remove those resources that are no longer needed. Most common garbage collection methods operate on the basis of automatically freeing up resources that are no longer used, i.e., that include objects which are no longer referred to by other objects. However, a common problem with all existing garbage collection mechanisms is that of memory leakage. During the development of a typical software application, objects may be specified by the developer that may unknowingly point to other objects. During run-time, this object may then point to another object which is no longer needed. If an object that is no longer needed and yet still exists in memory space because of such invalid requests or pointers, this is considered a memory leak and is undesirable. Because the object is never freed up, the memory space it occupies cannot be used by other resources. This is a particular problem when objects are continuously created during run-time but are never freed up, so that eventually the entire memory space of the virtual machine fills up and the machine or computer typically needs to be restarted.
The traditional approach to detecting and analyzing potential memory leaks during the software development process is to create an object display or object map for the developer that illustrates all of the preferred objects in the memory space, and then highlights or otherwise displays to the developer those objects that may represent potential memory leaks. The problem with this method is that it only gives a high level view of the object map, and provides very little useful information to the developer to accurately determine large scale memory leaks and find the responsible object or objects. Since the vast number of objects represented on the display tend to overwhelm the important information, i.e., which objects are prone to creating memory leaks, it is doubtful that this large scale object display is of much use to the developer.
Besides this traditional method of creating object maps, little else has been done in the software development field for creating tools that allow a virtual machine application developer to accurately access their application for potential memory leaks. Any new technique that would assist the developer in detecting such memory leaks would provide a significant advantage to the software developer, and would result in cleaner applications that minimize the need to restart the virtual machine on such a regular basis.
The invention provides a system and method for detecting memory leaks in a garbage collected environment. In particular, the invention provides a mechanism by which objects in the memory space of a virtual machine are analyzed as to whether they are “warm” or “cold”, i.e., how long they have persisted in memory without being accessed or referenced by another object. Following this analysis, the objects are clustered into groups or clusters of warm or cold objects, and any links from warm clusters to cold clusters are determined. This information is then provided to the software developer for use in detecting and analyzing potential memory leaks.
In accordance with one embodiment, the invention comprises a system for determining potential memory leaks in a run-time environment, said run-time environment including a virtual machine and a memory space for storing objects, comprising: an object temperature analyzer that determines the status of warm objects and cold objects in said memory, and the links between said warm and cold objects; and, a report mechanism that reports information about said links, for use in determining potential memory leaks.
In accordance with another embodiment, the invention comprises a method for use in determining potential memory leaks in a run-time environment, said run-time environment including a virtual machine and a memory space for storing objects, comprising: creating objects in the memory of a run-time environment; stamping each object with a time stamp when created; updating the time stamp as each object is accessed or referenced; after a time Tcheck marking each object as being either warm or cold; clustering warm objects together to form warm clusters and cold objects together to form cold clusters; and, displaying an object map showing links between warm clusters and cold clusters.
Additional embodiments are described herein. The above examples are not intended to be exhaustive or to limit the invention to the precise forms disclosed. It is intended that the scope of the invention be defined by the following claims and their equivalence.
As described herein, an embodiment of the present invention provides a system and method for detecting memory leaks in a garbage collected environment. In particular, the invention provides a mechanism by which objects in the memory space of a virtual machine are analyzed as to whether they are “warm” or “cold”, i.e., how long they have persisted in memory without being accessed or referenced by another object. Following this analysis, the objects are clustered into groups or clusters of warm or cold objects, and any links from warm clusters to cold clusters are determined. This information is then provided to the software developer for use in detecting and analyzing potential memory leaks.
In some embodiments, the number of clusters can be reduced by displaying to the developer only those clusters that occupy more than a particular amount of memory space, e.g. x bytes of memory. The actual implementation details of this may vary, and may be left to the developer to fine-tune for their particular needs or preferences.
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The present invention may be conveniently implemented using a conventional general purpose or a specialized digital computer or microprocessor programmed according to the teachings of the present disclosure. Appropriate software coding can readily be prepared by skilled programmers based on the teachings of the present disclosure, as will be apparent to those skilled in the software art.
In some embodiments, the present invention includes a computer program product which is a storage medium (media) having instructions stored thereon/in which can be used to program a computer to perform any of the processes of the present invention. The storage medium can include, but is not limited to, any type of disk including floppy disks, optical discs, DVD, CD-ROMs, microdrive, and magneto-optical disks, ROMs, RAMs, EPROMs, EEPROMs, DRAMs, VRAMs, flash memory devices, magnetic or optical cards, nanosystems (including molecular memory ICs), or any type of media or device suitable for storing instructions and/or data.
The foregoing description of the present invention has been provided for the purposes of illustration and description. It is not intended to be exhaustive or to limit the invention to the precise forms disclosed. Many modifications and variations will be apparent to the practitioner skilled in the art. Particularly, while the embodiments of the system and methods described above are described in the context of a WebLogic server, and a JRockit virtual machine, it will be evident that the system and methods may be used with other types of application servers, runtime systems, and virtual machines, including other types of JVMs. The embodiments were chosen and described in order to best explain the principles of the invention and its practical application, thereby enabling others skilled in the art to understand the invention for various embodiments and with various modifications that are suited to the particular use contemplated. It is intended that the scope of the invention be defined by the following claims and their equivalents.
This application is a continuation of U.S. Pat. No. 7,293,263, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR MEMORY LEAK DETECTION IN A VIRTUAL MACHINE ENVIRONMENT,” by Joakim Dahlstedt et al., issued on Nov. 6, 2007, which claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/435,487, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR MEMORY LEAK DETECTION IN A VIRTUAL MACHINE ENVIRONMENT,” by inventors Joakim Dahlstedt et al., filed on Dec. 20, 2002, both of which are incorporated herein by reference.
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Number | Date | Country | |
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20080065842 A1 | Mar 2008 | US |
Number | Date | Country | |
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Number | Date | Country | |
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Parent | 10737404 | Dec 2003 | US |
Child | 11935287 | US |