Effective Visualization of Object Allocation Sites

Abstract

Profiling the memory consumption of a software execution is usually carried out by characterizing calling-context trees. However, the plurality nature of this data-structure makes it difficult to adequately and efficiently exploit in practice. As a consequence, most of anomalies in memory footprints are addressed either manually or in an ad-hoc way. We propose an interactive visualization of the execution context related to object productions. Our visualization augments the traditional calling-context tree with visual cues to characterize object allocation sites.We performed a qualitative study involving eight software engineers conducting a software execution memory assessment. As a result, we found that participants find our visualization as beneficial to characterizing a memory consumption and to reducing the overall memory footprint.