Method And System For Estimating Garbage Collection Suspension Contributions Of Individual Allocation Sites

A computer-implemented method to identify memory allocation sites which cause undesired garbage collection in a distributed computing environment, comprising:

• receiving, by an agent, object allocation notifications from a garbage collecting memory management system, where the object allocation notifications identify object allocations and the agent is instrumented into a process being monitored on a host computing device;
• receiving, by the agent, object collection notifications from the memory management system, where the object collection notifications identify object deallocations;
• for each allocated object during a specified period of time, determining, by the agent, code location data for code responsible for allocating a given object;
• for each allocated object during the specified period of time, determining, by the agent, a number of garbage collection runs survived by a given object, including, determining a number of garbage collection runs for the given object at the time the given object is deallocated;
• for the objects allocated during the specified period of time, determining allocation sites with the highest survived garbage collection size, where the survived garbage collection size for a given object is proportional to product of the number of garbage collection runs survived by the given object and the memory size allocated to the given object;
• and
• presenting the code location data for object types with the highest survived garbage collection size to an operator.

A computer-implemented method to identify memory allocation sites which cause undesired garbage collection in a distributed computing environment, comprising:

• monitoring, by an allocation data analyzer, a metric describing duration of garbage collections for an application;
• retrieving, by the allocation data analyzer, a plurality of allocation records for a specified period of time, where the retrieval is in response to the metric exceeding a threshold and each allocation record includes an identifier for a type of allocated object, size of memory allocated by objects of the type, and survived garbage collection size which is proportional to product of a number of garbage collection runs survived by object of the type and the memory size allocated by object of the type, where the specific period of time is derived from the period of time where the metric exceeded the threshold, where the number of garbage collection runs survived by object of the type is determined in part by determining a number of garbage collection runs for a given object of the type at the time the given object is deallocated;
• grouping, by the allocation data analyzer, the plurality of allocation records into groups having the same type of allocated object;
• for each group, merging, by the allocation data analyzer, the allocation records in a given group into a merged allocation record;
• from the mergedr allocation records, determining, by the allocation data analyzer, object types with the highest survived garbage collection size;
• and
• presenting, by the allocation data analyzer, the object types with the highest survived garbage collection size to an operator.