Patent Document ID: 7770153
Application ID: 11134812
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of identifying heap-based bugs, comprising: building a model of heap behavior for a program executing on a computer comprising physical memory devices such that at least some memory storage for the program on the memory devices is managed as a heap, the building occurring by observing heap behavior of the program during execution, the model comprising a suite of numerical metrics, the numerical metrics measuring structure of a heap-graph which represents objects and pointers between objects in the heap; calculating a rate of change of the numerical metrics across one or more execution runs and comparing the rate of change to a threshold rate; identifying slowly-changing numerical metrics from the suite whose rate of change remains lower than the threshold rate to be globally stable; detecting anomalous heap behavior deviating from the model, wherein the detecting comprises computing the globally stable metrics from a subsequent execution of the program and detecting anomalies where the globally stable metrics deviate from predefined acceptable ranges, wherein the detecting ignores startup and shutdown of the program; and reporting information of the anomalous heap behavior as indicative of a heap-based bug in the program.