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As Java becomes a viable platform for server applications, performance
becomes a greater concern. An important aspect of Java Virtual
Machine performance is its dynamic memory management system (garbage
collection or GC). Traditional GC benchmarking often focuses on a
set of fixed applications. As a result, when an actual application's
memory behavior differs from that of the standard benchmarks, the
benchmark results do not help the user judge which GC implementation
suits her application the best. In this paper, we present HBench:JGC,
an application-specific benchmarking suite, based on the idea that
a system's performance be measured in the context of a specific
application. HBench:JGC employs a methodology that characterizes
the application memory usage and the GC implementation independently
and carefully combines both characterizations to form a single
metric that reflects a particular application's performance in the
presence of a particular GC implementation. We evaluate our approach
on Sun Microsystems's JDK1.2.2 classic JVM with a sequential
mark-sweep GC. Our results demonstrate HBench:JGC's unique predictive
power and its ability to provide meaningful metrics that lead to a
better understanding of GC performance.
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