A self-healing mechanism for memory leak

The introduction of the full paper discusses relevant problems and then proposes the research mentioned in the title. Sections 1 through 4 explain our self-healing mechanism. Their core consists of: (1) garbage collectors automatically free memory previously allocated by applications; generally, they discard unreachable objects from memory, leaving reachable objects intact; however, reachable objects may also be unusable; such objects are usually referred to as loitering objects; (2) we model the problem of loitering objects based on the theory of finite state machine from the view of virtual machine and find that the problem of loitering objects is not diagnosable; (3) then, we propose a self-healing policy to resolve the problem of loitering objects; the policy prevents memory leaks resulting from loitering objects by "paging" suspected live objects which may be or not loitering objects to disk and reloading them if they are required; (4) the objects which are true loitering objects will never be reloaded to memory so the memory occupied by them will be free. Section 5 presents experimental results in Figs.7 and 8 and then analyzes them; its findings are: (1) the self-healing policy is feasible and effective for removing loitering objects which will result in memory leak; (2) the superiority of the self-healing policy is that it does not need the source code of the programs which may bring loitering objects because of defects and it does not interfere with the running of the programs. Our self-healing mechanism, we believe, is very useful for complex software or third-party software integration where loitering objects and other memory leaks are likely here to stay.