I have some code that profiles Runtime.freeMemory. Here is my code:
package misc;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Random;
public class FreeMemoryTest {
private final ArrayList<Double> l;
private final Random r;
public FreeMemoryTest(){
this.r = new Random();
this.l = new ArrayList<Double>();
}
public static boolean memoryCheck() {
double freeMem = Runtime.getRuntime().freeMemory();
double totalMem = Runtime.getRuntime().totalMemory();
double fptm = totalMem * 0.05;
boolean toReturn = fptm > freeMem;
return toReturn;
}
public void freeMemWorkout(int max){
for(int i = 0; i < max; i++){
memoryCheck();
l.add(r.nextDouble());
}
}
public void workout(int max){
for(int i = 0; i < max; i++){
l.add(r.nextDouble());
}
}
public static void main(String[] args){
FreeMemoryTest f = new FreeMemoryTest();
int count = Integer.parseInt(args[1]);
long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
if(args[0].equals("f")){
f.freeMemWorkout(count);
} else {
f.workout(count);
}
long endTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println(endTime - startTime);
}
}
When I run the profiler using -Xrunhprof:cpu=samples, the vast majority of the calls are to the Runtime.freeMemory(), like this:
CPU SAMPLES BEGIN (total = 531) Fri Dec 7 00:17:20 2012
rank self accum count trace method
1 83.62% 83.62% 444 300274 java.lang.Runtime.freeMemory
2 9.04% 92.66% 48 300276 java.lang.Runtime.totalMemory
When I run the profiler using -Xrunhprof:cpu=time, I don't see any of the calls to Runtime.freeMemory at all, and the top five calls are as follows:
CPU TIME (ms) BEGIN (total = 10042) Fri Dec 7 00:29:51 2012
rank self accum count trace method
1 13.39% 13.39% 200000 307547 java.util.Random.next
2 9.69% 23.08% 1 307852 misc.FreeMemoryTest.freeMemWorkout
3 7.41% 30.49% 100000 307544 misc.FreeMemoryTest.memoryCheck
4 7.39% 37.88% 100000 307548 java.util.Random.nextDouble
5 4.35% 42.23% 100000 307561 java.util.ArrayList.add
These two profiles are so different from one another. I thought that samples was supposed to at least roughly approximate the results from the times, but here we see a very radical difference, something that consumes more than 80% of the samples doesn't even appear in the times profile. This does not make any sense to me, does anyone know why this is happening?
$ java -Xmx1000m -Xms1000m -jar memtest.jar a 20000000 5524
//does not have the calls to Runtime.freeMemory()
$ java -Xmx1000m -Xms1000m -jar memtest.jar f 20000000 9442
//has the calls to Runtime.freeMemory()
Running with freemem requires approximately twice the amount of time as running without it. If 80% of the CPU time is spent in java.Runtime.freeMemory(), and I remove that call, I would expect the program to speed up by a factor of approximately 5. As we can see above, the program speeds up by a factor of approximately 2.
A slowdown of a factor of 5 is way worse than a slowdown of a factor of 2 that was observed empirically, so what I do not understand is how the sampling profiler is so far off from reality.