Effective interprocedural resource leak detection

Abstract

Garbage collection relieves programmers from the burden of explicit memory management. However, explicit management is still required for finite system resources, such as I/O streams, fonts, and database connections. Failure to release unneeded system resources results in resource leaks, which can lead to performance degradation and system crashes. In this paper, we present a new tool, Tracker, that performs static analysis to find resource leaks in Java programs. Tracker is an industrial-strength tool that is usable in an interactive setting: it works on millions of lines of code in a matter of minutes and it has a low false positive rate. We describe the design, implementation and evaluation of Tracker, focusing on the features that make the tool scalable and its output actionable by the user. © 2010 ACM.