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ACDC-JS: explorative benchmarking of javascript memory management

Martin Aigner
Thomas Huetter
Christoph M. Kirsch
Alexander Miller
Mario Preishuber
Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Dynamic Languages, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2014), pp. 67-78

Abstract

We present ACDC-JS, an open-source JavaScript memory management benchmarking tool. ACDC-JS incorporates a heap model based on real web applications and may be configured to expose virtually any relevant performance characteristics of JavaScript memory management systems. ACDC-JS is based on ACDC, a benchmarking tool for C/C++ that models periodic allocation and deallocation behavior (AC) as well as persistent memory (DC). We identify important characteristics of JavaScript mutator behavior and propose a configurable heap model based on typical distributions of these characteristics as foundation for ACDC-JS. We describe heap analyses of 13 real web applications extending existing work on JavaScript behavior analysis. Our experimental results show that ACDC-JS enables performance benchmarking and debugging of state-of-the-art JavaScript virtual machines such as V8 and SpiderMonkey by exposing key aspects of their memory management performance.

Research Areas