Effective Visualization of Object Allocation Sites

Modern software execution platforms are designed to efficiently cope with a massive number of objects creations and destructions. However, ensuring that the memory consumed by an application execution is not excessive remains a manual activity. It is widely known that debugging memory issues is a tedious and error-prone activity.

We present an interactive visualization of a software execution profiling. Our visualization is designed to help developers to identify where and how memory is consummed by an application. The visualization shows context related to object productions. Our visualization augments the traditional calling-context tree with visual cues to characterize object allocation sites.

Artifact

We offer our artifact for three different platforms:

1. MacOs
2. Linux
3. Windows

Once downloaded, click over the Pharo application to open it. This will open the VM of Pharo with an initial Playground describing the artifact. If the previous step fails, please follow the next instructions:

MacOs

1. Open a terminal.
2. Acces to the folder MacOs.
3. Write the following script on terminal: ./Pharo6.1-64.app/Contents/MacOS/Pharo
4. The VM of Pharo with an initial Playground describing the artifact.

Linux

1. Download VMLinux.zip.
2. Access to the folder AlternativeLinux.
3. Descompress the respective PharoLauncher.zip
4. Run the pharo launcher.
5. On the top right of the window launcher, select the third button (import).
6. Select the option "launch an image from the file system".
7. Select the file on /Imagen/MemoryProfiler.image
8. The VM of Pharo with an initial Playground describing the artifact.

Windows

1. Open a terminal.
2. Acces to the folder Windows.
3. Write the following script on terminal: start Pharo
4. The VM of Pharo with an initial Playground describing the artifact.

Video

We also provide a tutorial video of our visualization.