ACDC-JS: Explorative Benchmarking of JavaScript Memory Management

We present ACDC-JS, an open-source1 JavaScript memory man-agement benchmarking tool. ACDC-JS incorporates a heap model based on real web applications and may be configured to expose virtually any relevant performance characteristics of JavaScript memory management systems. ACDC-JS is based on ACDC [11], a benchmarking tool for C/C++ that models periodic allocation and deallocation behavior (AC) as well as persistent memory (DC). We identify important characteristics of JavaScript mutator behavior and propose a configurable heap model based on typical distri-butions of these characteristics as foundation for ACDC-JS. We describe heap analyses of 13 real web applications extending ex-isting work on JavaScript behavior analysis [13]. Our experimental results show that ACDC-JS enables performance benchmarking and debugging of state-of-the-art JavaScript virtual machines such as V8 and SpiderMonkey by exposing key aspects of their memory management performance