We are all Economists Now: Economic Utility for Multiple Heap Sizing

Multiple virtual machine (VM) workloads are increasingly com-mon, given the growth of managed enterprise application systems and consolidated virtual servers. Until now, there has been no prin-cipled approach to partitioning memory resource between multiple co-located VMs. In this paper, we develop a general framework for multi-VM heap sizing, based on the principle of utility maximiza-tion from microeconomic theory. We apply utility maximization to static heap sizing, and obtain performance improvements slightly better than current best-practice static heap sizing, and compara-ble with HotSpot ergonomics (current best-practice dynamic heap sizing). The major advantage of our approach is its simplicity and predictable resource utilization