Vasco: A visual approach to explore object churn in framework-intensive applications

Bloat, and particularly object churn, is a common performance problem in framework-intensive applications. Object churn consists of an excessive use of temporary objects. Identifying and understanding sources of churn is a difficult and labor-intensive task, despite recent advances in automated analysis techniques. We present an interactive visualization approach designed to help developers quickly and intuitively explore the behavior of their application with respect to object churn. We have implemented this technique in Vasco, a new flexible and scalable visualization platform. Vasco is designed to minimize the cognitive effort required for the visualization task. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by applying it to three framework-intensive applications and identifying previously unreported churn in a commercial system.