A Specification-Based Approach to the Testing of Java Memory Bloat

Abstract

Inefficient use of memory may cause memory bloat, and the bloat may lead to performance slowdowns or even crashes. To address the problem, lots of efforts have been devoted to the diagnosing of bloat, especially the bloat caused by memory leaks. However, testing and identifying the executions potentially containing bloat, which act as key steps before diagnosing, are still challenging. In this paper, we introduce a memory specification tool named MemSpec to help programmers test memory inefficiencies in Java programs. The specification works as a test oracle to automatically determine whether a program suffers from memory bloat. Users can write their own memory specifications using our specification language. MemSpec weaves the specification checking mechanisms into the tested programs. During test runs, memory bloat will be reported if the some specifications are not satisfied. With this specification-based approach, a tester does not need to manually watch the program executions to identify bloat. The automatically reporting of memory bloat can reduce the manual efforts in memory inefficiency testing. We test the proposed approach on ArgoUML. The initial results show that it is effective.