Abstract
We present recoverable class loaders to enable a fast start-up and recovery of Java applications. This is achieved by snapshooting the static state of Java applications namely the class loaders and their associated class objects, which are then recovered during subsequent restarts. Recoverable class loaders are especially useful in the context of mobile applications and mobile services. First, they allow to speed up shutdown and restart of applications for power- and resource-management reasons on resource-restricted mobile devices. Second, services can be much faster rebooted to cure software faults such as memory leaks thereby improving the availability of services. We implemented recoverable class loaders inside the JamVM and the OSGi middleware Oscar. For both cases of use—Java application restart and service recovery—we provide experimental evaluations that show a substantially reduced start-up time from up to 96%.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Borman S, Paice S, Webster M, Trotter M, McGuire R, Stevens A, Hutchison B, Berry R. A serially reusable Java (TM) virtual machine implementation for high volume, highly reliable, transaction processing. Technical Report TR 29.3406, IBM Hursley, Hursley Park, UK
Candea G, Kawamoto S, Fujiki Y, Friedman G, Fox A (2004) Microreboot—a technique for cheap recovery. In: OSDI’04, USENIX, Berkeley, 5 December 2004, pp 31–44
Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (2008) SPEC JVM98 benchmarks. http://www.spec.org/osg/jvm98/
Corrie B (2006) Java technology, IBM style: class sharing. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-ibmjava4/
Czajkowski G, Daynès L, Nystrom N (2002) Code sharing among virtual machines. In: ECOOP ’02. Springer, London, pp 155–177
The IEEE and The Open Group (2004) mmap() the open group base specifications issue 6, IEEE Std 1003.1. http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/mmap.html
Jonkers HBM (1979) A fast garbage compaction algorithm. Inf Process Lett 9(1):26–30
Kawachiya K, Ogata K, Silva D, Onodera T, Komatsu H, Nakatani T (2007) Cloneable JVM: a new approach to start isolated java applications faster. In: VEE ’07. ACM, New York, pp 1–11
Lindholm T, Yellin F (1999) The Java (TM) virtual machine specification, 2nd edn. Sun Microsystems, Espoo
Lougher R (2007) JamVM. http://jamvm.sourceforge.net/
Lowell DE, Chandra S, Chen PM (2000) Exploring failure transparency and the limits of generic recovery. In: OSDI’00, USENIX, Berkeley, 22–25 October 2000, pp 289–304
Sun Microsystems (2004) JDK 5.0 Documentation. http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/
Sun Microsystems (2007) Official Java EE website. http://java.sun.com/javaee/
The OSGi Alliance (2005) OSGi service platform: core specification, release 4. Technical report
Suezawa T (2000) Persistent execution state of a Java virtual machine. In: JAVA ’00: proc. of the ACM 2000 conf on Java Grande. ACM, New York, pp 160–167
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Nikolov, V., Kapitza, R. & Hauck, F.J. Recoverable Class Loaders for a Fast Restart of Java Applications. Mobile Netw Appl 14, 53–64 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-008-0115-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-008-0115-8