language: en

[Appears in M. Mozer, M. Jordan and T. Petsche, eds., Advances In Neural Information Processing Systems 9, MIT Press, 1997]

Predicting Lifetimes in Dynamically Allocated Memory

David A. Cohn
Adaptive Systems Group Harlequin, Inc.
Menlo Park, CA 94025
cohn@harlequin.com
Satinder Singh
Department of Computer Science University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309
baveja@cs.colorado.edu

Abstract Predictions of lifetimes of dynamically allocated objects can be used to improve time and space efficiency of dynamic memory management in computer programs. Barrett and Zorn [1993] used a simple lifetime predictor and demonstrated this improvement on a variety of computer programs. In this paper, we use decision trees to do lifetime prediction on the same programs and show significantly better prediction. Our method also has the advantage that during training we can use a large number of features and let the decision tree automatically choose the relevant subset.

1 INTELLIGENT MEMORY ALLOCATION