Influence of program inputs on the selection of garbage collectors

Many studies have shown that the best performer among a set of garbage collectors tends to be different for different applications. Researchers have proposed application-specific 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, based on regression techniques, we demonstrate the predictability of the minimum possible heap size, indicating the potential feasibility of the input-specific selection of garbage collectors.