English

Who Ate My Memory? Towards Attribution in Memory Management

Software Engineering 2023-08-21 v1

Abstract

To understand applications' memory usage details, engineers use instrumented builds and profiling tools. Both approaches are impractical for use in production environments or deployed mobile applications. As a result, developers can gather only high-level memory-related statistics for deployed software. In our experience, the lack of granular field data makes fixing performance and reliability-related defects complex and time-consuming. The software industry needs lightweight solutions to collect detailed data about applications' memory usage to increase developer productivity. Current research into memory attribution-related data structures, techniques, and tools is in the early stages and enables several new research avenues.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2212.11866,
  title  = {Who Ate My Memory? Towards Attribution in Memory Management},
  author = {Gunnar Kudrjavets and Ayushi Rastogi and Jeff Thomas and Nachiappan Nagappan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.11866},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

3 pages. To be published in the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2023), May 14 - May 20 2023, Melbourne, Australia

R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:49:15.620Z