Search

In object oriented languages, dynamic memory allocation is a fundamental concept. When using such a language in hard real-time systems, it becomes important to bound both the worst-case execution time and the worst-case memory consumption. In this paper, we present an analysis to determine the worst-case heap allocations of tasks. The analysis builds upon techniques that are well established for worst-case execution time analysis. The difference is that the cost function is not the execution time of instructions in clock cycles, but the allocation in bytes. In contrast to worst-case execution time analysis, worst-case heap allocation analysis is not processor dependent. However, the cost function depends on the object layout of the runtime system. The analysis is evaluated with several real-time benchmarks to establish the usefulness of the analysis, and to compare the memory consumption of different object layouts.