Introducing Heapothesys - An Open-Source Garbage Collector Latency Benchmark with Predictable Allocation Rates

The Amazon Corretto team introduces Heapothesys, an open-source benchmark which simulates fundamental application characteristics that affect JVM GC latency. Heapothesys creates scenarios with pre-determined object allocation rates, heap occupancy, and heap sizes, then reports the resulting JVM pauses. The intent is to help OpenJDK developers investigate capability boundaries of the technologies they are implementing. It provides reference points for how different collector implementations perform when these basic stress factors are dialed up and collector leeway to act shrinks. We are working on enhancing Heapothesys to better model and predict additional application behaviors (see issue-12).

The Heapothesys source code is available here under the Apache-2.0 license. We welcome issues, patches, and enhancements. Our blog post dives deeper into the benchmark and is available here.