Runtime Object Lifetime Profiler for Latency Sensitive Big Data Applications

Abstract

Latency sensitive services such as credit-card fraud detection and website targeted advertisement rely on Big Data platforms which run on top of memory managed runtimes, such as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). These platforms, however, suffer from unpredictable and unacceptably high pause times due to inadequate memory management decisions (e.g., allocating objects with very different lifetimes next to each other, resulting in severe memory fragmentation). This leads to frequent and long application pause times, breaking Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This problem has been previously identified, and results show that current memory management techniques are ill-suited for applications that hold in memory massive amounts of long-lived objects (which is the case for a wide spectrum of Big Data applications).