Patent ID: 7447694

Claim:
A method comprising steps of: A) deriving a suspect region exhibiting problematic data structure evolution in a running application; B) periodically traversing only selected subgraphs of the suspect region to a depth of one, in order to detect data structure changes, wherein a data structure is a subgraph of an object reference graph snapshot and the subgraph comprises nodes that own constituents; C) characterizing the data structure changes; D) updating a histogram of the suspect region with the characterizations of the data structure changes, wherein updating the histogram comprises: 1) allocating one row for each suspect region; and 2) storing, for each suspect region: a ranking of the suspect region; a proxy-size of the suspect region; and a summary of attributes of a last change detected and previous n changes detected; wherein storing the summary of attributes comprises: i) classifying the suspect region as a monotonic grower if only addition updates were detected; ii) classifying the suspect region as an oscillator if a substantially equal distribution of addition and removal updates were detected; iii) classifying the suspect region as a shrinker if only removal updates were detected; and iv) classifying the suspect region as a flatliner if no updates were detected; E) using the characterized data structure changes to describe, characterize, and identify an evolutionary trend of the suspect region as a whole; and F) reporting the characterized changes to the region to an analysis agent.