mVizion: taking a closer look at memory utilization in C/C++ programs
Nadia N. Tkach · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2011
Computer system performance depends on the efficiency and precision of all of its components. When it comes to software, the primary goal is to ensure the most effective use of the hardware resources while maintaining the accuracy of the computations being handled. While many software developers focus their attention on the running time complexity and parallelism of computations in terms of CPU utilization; there is an evident lack of memory map analysis and RAM usage efficiency. mVizion is a novel visualization tool, combined with a digital forensic tool Cafegrind, shows how different memory utilization patterns are being used by different C/C++ programs, running in Unix/Linux environments. Cafegrind is used to produce different traces of heap memory accesses, including both allocations and deallocation, from different applications. mVizion is then used to interpret these traces, and through the use of multiple windows present detailed information about each distinct data structure; thus offering a comprehensive view and deeper understanding of a program inner memory workings. The evaluation of mVizion shows a fair performance and its capacity to scale to large log data files.