Efficient Reuse of Local Regions in Memory-limited Mobile Devices

Abstract

Many researches aim to improve memory management for performance, efficiency, ease of use, and safety. Region-based memory management, a newly investigated technique for memory-limited mobile devices, splits the heap into one global (persistent) region, and multiple local regions-one local region per method invocation. Each object allocation is initially assigned to a local region and later transferred to the global region if needed. The allocated memory for a local region is implicitly reclaimed when the associated method call finishes. In this paper, we propose a technique to reduce heap memory usage in memory-limited devices by reusing early local regions in the calling sequence, as they are rarely accessed during the current method. Our experiment with SpecJvm98 shows up to 9% reduction in heap memory(1).