Maybe this: https://rmod.inria.fr/web/publications/bib?query=Poli17c&display=abstract
Guillermo Polito, Luc Fabresse, Noury Bouraqadi, and Stéphane Ducasse. Run-Fail-Grow: Creating Tailored Object-Oriented Runtimes Producing a small deployment version of an application is a challenge because static abstractions such as packages cannot anticipate the use of their parts at runtime. Thus, an application often occupies more memory than actually needed. Tailoring is one of the main solutions to this problem i.e., extracting used code units such as classes and methods of an application. However, existing tailoring techniques are mostly based on static type annotations. These techniques cannot efficiently tailor applications in all their extent (e.g., runtime object graphs and metadata) nor be used in the context of dynamically-typed languages. We propose a run-fail-grow technique to tailor applications using their runtime execution. Run-fail-grow launches (a) a reference application containing the original application to tailor and (b) a nurtured application containing only a seed with a minimal set of code units the user wants to ensure in the final application. The nurtured application is executed, failing when it founds missing objects, classes or methods. On failure, the necessary elements are installed into the nurtured application from the reference one, and the execution resumes. The nurtured application is executed until it finishes, or until the developer explicitly finishes it, for example in the case of a web application. resulting in an object memory (i.e., a heap) with only objects, classes and methods required to execute the application. To validate our approach we implemented a tool based on Virtual Machine modifications, namely Tornado. Tornado succeeds to create very small memory footprint versions of applications e.g., a simple object-oriented heap of 11kb. We show how tailoring works on application code, base and third-party libraries even supporting human interaction with user G. interfaces. These experiments show memory savings ranging from 95\% to 99\%. > > yes, Mariano Peck made a PhD on that (when we were exploring “how to get > smaller images” possibilities). > We finally went for bootstrap, but we made an analysis on all possibilities > around. > Mariano was doing swapping out… Mariano Martinez Peck, Noury Bouraqadi, Marcus Denker, Stéphane Ducasse, and Luc Fabresse. Marea: An Efficient Application-Level Object Graph Swapper. Abstract Abstract During the execution of object-oriented applications, several millions of objects are created, used and then collected if they are not referenced. Problems appear when objects are unused but cannot be garbage-collected because they are still referenced from other objects. This is an issue because those objects waste primary memory and applications use more primary memory than they actually need. We claim that relying on the operating system's (OS) virtual memory is not always enough since it cannot take into account the domain and structure of applications. At the same time, applications have no easy way to parametrize nor cooperate with memory management. In this paper, we present Marea, an efficient application-level object graph swapper for object-oriented programming languages. Its main goal is to offer the programmer a novel solution to handle application-level memory. Developers can instruct our system to release primary memory by swapping out unused yet referenced objects to secondary memory. Our approach has been qualitatively and quantitatively validated. Our experiments and benchmarks on real-world applications show that Marea can reduce the memory footprint between 23\% and 36\%.
