Predicting Lifetimes in Dynamically Allocated Memory

Predictions oflifetimes of dynamically allocated objects can be used to improve time and space efficiency of dynamic memory manage(cid:173) ment in computer programs. Barrett and Zorn [1993] used a simple lifetime predictor and demonstrated this improvement on a variety of computer programs. In this paper, we use decision trees to do lifetime prediction on the same programs and show significantly better prediction . Our method also has the advantage that during training we can use a large number of features and let the decision tree automatically choose the relevant subset. Dynamic memory allocation is used in many computer applications.