Efficient and Viable Handling of Large Object Traces

Understanding and tracking down memory-related performance problems is a tedious task, especially when it involves automatically managed memory, i.e., garbage collection. A multitude of monitoring tools show the substantial need of developers to deal with these problems efficiently. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art tools either generate an inscrutable amount of trace data or produce only a coarse-grained view of the application's memory behavior. While the first approach generates information that is very detailed albeit difficult to handle, the second approach is more efficient but may fail to provide vital information. In this paper, we propose a method to combine the advantages of both approaches, i.e., a method to handle fine-grained tracing information efficiently. Specifically, we present an on-the-fly compression technique for tracing data with reasonable overhead. Furthermore, we show how to overwrite old parts of the trace to circumvent its unlimited growth, but almost without losing vital information. We also provide a detailed evaluation of our approach, showing that the introduced run-time overhead is negligible compared to similar tracing tools as well as that the information quality recovers quickly after overwriting parts of the old tracing data.