Book Reviews

Counsel on Appeal Edited by Arthur A. Charpentier New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. Pp. xi, 223. reviewer: Richard G. Singer =================================== Law Without Sanctions By Michael Barkun New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968. Pp. 175. $6.50 reviewer: Alfred H. Knight, II

Picturing Marty Gardner / Remembering Professor Martin Gardner / Remembering Marty Gardner / In Memoriam Professor Marty Gardner / In Memoriam to Professor Martin (Marty) Gardner

Tributes to Martin (“Marty”) R. Gardner, professor for forty-three years at the University of Nebraska College of Law

Control theory for principled heap sizing

We propose a new, principled approach to adaptive heap sizing based on control theory. We review current state-of-the-art heap sizing mechanisms, as deployed in Jikes RVM and HotSpot. We then formulate heap sizing as a control problem, apply and tune a standard controller algorithm, and evaluate its performance on a set of well-known benchmarks. We find our controller adapts the heap size more responsively than existing mechanisms. This responsiveness allows tighter virtual machine memory footprints while preserving target application throughput, which is ideal for both embedded and utility computing domains. In short, we argue that formal, systematic approaches to memory management should be replacing ad-hoc heuristics as the discipline matures. Control-theoretic heap sizing is one such systematic approach