What Do You Mean by Memory? When Engineers Are Lost in the Maze of Complexity

Abstract

An accepted practice to decrease applications' memory usage is to reduce the amount and frequency of memory allocations. Factors such as (a) the prevalence of out-of-memory (OOM) killers, (b) memory allocations in modern programming languages done implicitly, (c) overcommitting being a default strategy in the Linux kernel, and (d) the rise in complexity and terminology related to memory management makes the existing guidance inefficient. The industry needs detailed guidelines for optimizing memory usage targeting specific operating systems (OS) and programming language types.

3 pages. To be published in the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2024), April 14 - April 20 2024, Lisbon, Portugal