Excessive Heap Allocation

Excessive heap allocation leads to performance degradation for two reasons: the cost of the allocation operations themselves, and because the heap is filled up more quickly, the cost of more frequent garbage collections. With the JVMPI, the profiler follows the following steps to pinpoint the part of the program that performs excessive heap allocation:

• Enable the event notification for object allocation, so that the virtual machine issues a function call to the profiler agent when the current thread performs heap allocation.
• Obtain the current stack trace from the virtual machine when object allocation event arrives. The stack trace serves as a good identification of the heap allocation site. The programmer should concentrate on optimizing busy heap allocation sites.
• Enable the event notification for object reclamation, so that the profiler can keep track of how many objects allocated from a given site are being kept live.