Seminar: Memory Monitoring and Analysis

General Information

Modern programming languages could not work without heap memory. Via special operations such as new (for example in Java or C#) or methods such as malloc (for example in C) programmers can allocate objects (or reserve memory regions) in the heap which they can then freely modify.

While programmers have to do memory management on their own in older and more system-near systems (especially reserving and freeing memory), more modern programming languages support programmers using a garbage collector, who autonomously removes non-needed objects from the heap. Nevertheless, depending on the used language and system, various problems related to memory can occur. For example, it can happen that, due to programming mistakes, the garbage collector cannot free certain objects even though they are not needed anymore in the program. It is important to support programmers in detecting, identifying, and countering these problems.

In this seminar, participants read and process classical and state-of-the-art literature regarding the topic Memory Monitoring, i.e., the recording of memory states and memory operations, as well as Memory Analysis, i.e., the processing of such data. The literature will be summarized and, mixed with own ideas, presented by the participant. Students who want to join this seminar ideally already have basic knowledge of memory management and/or garbage collection, for example by visiting the lecture "System Software". Nevertheless, we try to give a general overview of the topic in the kickoff meeting to make it easier for the participants to select a suitable and interesting topic.

Preleminary Timetable

Important Information

This course uses JKU Moodle for all announcments (Forum with mail notifications), material, information regarding the LVA mode, assignments and submissions, as well as corrections and grading.