Low Overhead Allocation Sampling in a Garbage Collected Virtual Machine.
Abstract
Compared to the more commonly used time-based profiling, allocation profiling provides an alternate view of the execution of allocation heavy dynamically typed languages.However, profiling every single allocation in a program is very inefficient.We present a sampling allocation profiler that is deeply integrated into the garbage collector of PyPy, a Python virtual machine.This integration ensures tunable low overhead for the allocation profiler, which we measure and quantify.Enabling allocation sampling profiling with a sampling period of 4 MB leads to a maximum time overhead of 25% in our benchmarks, over un-profiled regular execution.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Logic
programming
and type systems
Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
Advanced Database Systems and Queries
Publication details
- Journal / source
- The Journal of Object Technology
- Volume
- 25
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1:1–1:1
- Publication date
- 1 January 2026
- Language
- EN