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Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Article . 2026 . Peer-reviewed
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FlexHeap: Dynamic I/O-Aware Heap Resizing for Managed Applications

Authors: Kolokasis, Iacovos G.; Akram, Shoaib; Zakkak, Foivos; Pratikakis, Polyvios; Bilas, Angelos;

FlexHeap: Dynamic I/O-Aware Heap Resizing for Managed Applications

Abstract

Popular JVM-based search and analytics systems, such as Elasticsearch and Spark, rely on the OS page cache (I/O cache) to accelerate storage access. However, dividing memory between the JVM heap and the I/O cache creates a trade-off: enlarging the heap reduces garbage collection (GC) overhead but starves the I/O cache, while shrinking it improves I/O performance but raises GC cost. Existing heap resizing mechanisms ignore I/O and thus fail to address this trade-off, resulting in inefficient memory utilization and degraded performance. In this paper, we propose FlexHeap, a heap resizing mechanism for Garbage First (G1), the default OpenJDK garbage collector, that dynamically partitions a fixed DRAM budget between the JVM heap and the I/O cache. Between GC intervals, it estimates the CPU time lost to GC and to I/O stalls and repartitions DRAM to reduce their combined cost. FlexHeap relies on three concepts: (1) It makes resizing decisions using G1 collection boundaries. (2) It uses a history-based approach to estimate the cost of GC and I/O stalls for the future intervals. (3) It uses an adaptive resizing step that scales with changes in the combined cost. We implement FlexHeap in OpenJDK 21’s G1 garbage collector and evaluate it on two widely used systems: the Elasticsearch search engine and the Spark analytic framework. Compared to the G1 heap resizing mechanism, FlexHeap improves performance by an average of 30% in Elasticsearch and by an average of 33% in Spark. It outperforms Vertical G1, a state-of-the-art enhancement to the default G1 heap resizing mechanism, that returns unused memory to the OS eagerly, by 50% on average in throughput, demonstrating that JVM heap resizing needs to consider I/O overhead in search and analytics applications.

Keywords

Memory Management, Garbage Collection, G1 Garbage Collector, Java Virtual Machine (JVM), eBPF, Application Heap and Kernel Page I/O Cache Resizing

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
Average