Measuring dynamic memory invocations in object-oriented programs

Abstract

Dynamic memory management has been a high cost component in many software systems. Studies have shown that memory intensive C programs can consume up to 30% of the program runtime in memory allocation and liberation. The OOP language system tends to perform object creation and deletion prolifically. An empirical study shown that C++ programs can have ten times more memory allocation and deallocation than comparable C programs. However, the allocation behavior of C++ programs is rarely reported. This paper attempts to locate where the dynamic memory allocations are coming from and report an empirical study of dynamic memory invocations in C++ programs. Firstly, this paper summarizes the hypothesis of situations that invoke the dynamic memory management explicitly and implicitly. They are: constructors, copy constructors, overloading assignment operator=, type conversions and application specific member functions. Secondly, the development of a source code level tracing tool is reported as the procedure to investigate the hypothesis. Thirdly, results include behavioral patterns of memory allocations. With these patterns, we may increase the reusability of the resources. For example, a profile-based strategy can be used to improve the performance of dynamic memory management. The C++ programs that were traced include Java compiler, CORBA compliant and visual framework.