The Heap of the Living Dead: Post-mortem Memory Profiling for Java Applications

Managed memory, i.e., garbage collected memory, has gained wide-spread use because it relieves the programmer from freeing heap objects manually and allows for fast allocations. However, these advantages come at the cost of a difficult to understand memory manager and garbage collector. Therefore, searching for memory-related performance degredations is a tedious task because the reasons for slow allocations, a large garbage collection pause, or a high garbage collection frequency might not be obvious.