ACDC-JS: explorative benchmarking of javascript memory management

We present ACDC-JS, an open-source JavaScript memory management benchmarking tool. ACDC-JS incorporates a heap model based on real web applications and may be configured to expose virtually any relevant performance characteristics of JavaScript memory management systems. ACDC-JS is based on ACDC, a benchmarking tool for C/C++ that models periodic allocation and deallocation behavior (AC) as well as persistent memory (DC). We identify important characteristics of JavaScript mutator behavior and propose a configurable heap model based on typical distributions of these characteristics as foundation for ACDC-JS. We describe heap analyses of 13 real web applications extending existing work on JavaScript behavior analysis. Our experimental results show that ACDC-JS enables performance benchmarking and debugging of state-of-the-art JavaScript virtual machines such as V8 and SpiderMonkey by exposing key aspects of their memory management performance.