Dynamic analysis of inefficiently-used containers

Abstract

The goal of this work is to identify suspicious usage of containers, as an indicator of potential performance inefficiencies. To analyze container-related behavior and performance, we propose a dynamic analysis that tracks and records the flow of element objects to/from container objects. The observed interactions among containers and their elements is captured by a container-element flow graph. This graph is then analyzed by three detectors of potential container inefficiencies, based on certain patterns of suspicious behavior. In a promising initial study, this approach uncovered a number of performance problems in realistic Java applications.