Software Visualizations to Analyze Memory Consumption: A Literature Review

Abstract

Understanding and optimizing memory usage of software applications is a difficult task, usually involving the analysis of large amounts of memory-related complex data. Over the years, numerous software visualizations have been proposed to help developers analyze the memory usage information of their programs. This article reports a systematic literature review of published works centered on software visualizations for analyzing the memory consumption of programs. We have systematically selected 46 articles and categorized them based on the tasks supported, data collected, visualization techniques, evaluations conducted, and prototype availability. As a result, we introduce a taxonomy based on these five dimensions to identify the main challenges of visualizing memory consumption and opportunities for improvement. Despite the effort to evaluate visualizations, we also find that most articles lack evidence regarding how these visualizations perform in practice. We also highlight that few articles are available for developers willing to adopt a visualization for memory consumption analysis. Additionally, we describe a number of research areas that are worth exploring.