The study and handling of program inputs in the selection of garbage collectors

• Authors: Xipeng Shen;Feng Mao;Kai Tian;Eddy Zheng Zhang
• Venue: ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
• Year: 2009

Many studies have shown that the best performer among a set of garbage collectors tends to be different for different applications. Researchers have proposed applicationspecific selection of garbage collectors. In this work, we concentrate on a second dimension of the problem: the influence of program inputs on the selection of garbage collectors. We collect tens to hundreds of inputs for a set of Java benchmarks, and measure their performance on Jikes RVM with different heap sizes and garbage collectors. A rigorous statistical analysis produces four-fold insights. First, inputs influence the relative performance of garbage collectors significantly, causing large variations to the top set of garbage collectors across inputs. Profiling one or few runs is thus inadequate for selecting the garbage collector that works well for most inputs. Second, when the heap size ratio is fixed, one or two types of garbage collectors are enough to stimulate the top performance of the program on all inputs. Third, for some programs, the heap size ratio significantly affects the relative performance of different types of garbage collectors. For the selection of garbage collectors on those programs, it is necessary to have a cross-input predictive model that predicts the minimum possible heap size of the execution on an arbitrary input. Finally, by adoptingstatistical learning techniques, we investigate the cross-input predictability of the influence. Experimental results demonstrate that with regression and classification techniques, it is possible to predict the best garbage collector (along with the minimum possible heap size) with reasonable accuracy given an arbitrary input to an application. The exploration opens the opportunities for tailoring the selection of garbage collectors to not only applications but also their inputs.