Worst-case analysis of heap allocations

  • Authors:

  • Wolfgang Puffitsch;Benedikt Huber;Martin Schoeberl

  • Affiliations:

  • Institute of Computer Engineering, Vienna University of Technology, Austria;Institute of Computer Engineering, Vienna University of Technology, Austria;Dept. of Informatics and Mathematical Modeling, Technical University of Denmark

  • Venue:
  • ISoLA'10 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Leveraging applications of formal methods, verification, and validation - Volume Part II
  • Year:
  • 2010

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In object oriented languages, dynamic memory allocation is a fundamental concept. When using such a language in hard real-time systems, it becomes important to bound both the worst-case execution time and the worst-case memory consumption. In this paper, we present an analysis to determine the worst-case heap allocations of tasks. The analysis builds upon techniques that are well established for worst-case execution time analysis. The difference is that the cost function is not the execution time of instructions in clock cycles, but the allocation in bytes. In contrast to worst-case execution time analysis, worst-case heap allocation analysis is not processor dependent. However, the cost function depends on the object layout of the runtime system. The analysis is evaluated with several real-time benchmarks to establish the usefulness of the analysis, and to compare the memory consumption of different object layouts.