Memory leakage testing using aspects

A memory leakage is a programming bug left by the programmer wherein an object which is no longer needed has not been dereferenced in the code. Programming languages like Java provide Garbage Collection mechanism which automatically reclaims memory occupied by objects which are no longer referenced and thus are no longer accessible by the application code. However memory leaks are not garbage collected and thus degrade the system´s performance over time as they reduce the amount of available memory. Even the system may run out of physical memory as these unused blocks of memory add up over time. Therefore it becomes important to examine the application code for presence of such unwanted memory leaks. In this paper, we propose the use of Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) for the purpose of memory leakage testing of application code. We will demonstrate how AOP can be used to test for memory leakage bugs by creeping inside the program´s modules without modifying their source code. Whilst most available tools for finding memory leaks can only highlight suspicious objects, using AOP we can determine the exact location in the source code where the unfreed allocation occurs.