Evaluating the importance of virtual memory for Java

The Java language has rapidly become widespread and it is being used to implement a broad range of applications, including applications with high resource requirements. For this reason, it is important to evaluate the suitability of the Java environment to execute such applications. This paper presents an evaluation of the effects of memory management in the context of memory intensive Java applications executed on a virtual memory system. The goal of this work is to detect the most critical memory management issues for Java applications performance. We measure the overhead that each memory management task adds to the application execution, and we determine which part of this overhead is due to the memory access pattern of the application and which part is due to the interaction between the different memory management tasks.