Object equivalence: revisiting object equality profiling (an experience report)

Abstract

Modern object-oriented programming languages greatly alleviate the memory management for programmers. Despite the efficiency of garbage collection and Just-In-Time program analyzes, memory still remains prone to be wasted. A bloated memory may have severe consequences, including frequent execution lags due to a high pressure on the garbage collector and suboptimal object dependencies. We found that dynamically monitoring object production sites and the equivalence of the produced objects is key to identify wasted memory consumption caused by redundant objects. We implemented optimizations for reducing the memory consumption of six applications, achieving a reduction over 40% in half of the applications without having any prior knowledge of these applications. Our results partially replicate the results obtained by Marinov and O'Callahan and explore new ways to identify redundant objects.