System and method of measuring application resource usage

The present invention relates generally to a system and method for measuring application memory use, and more particularly to measuring heap usage of each of a plurality of applications running inside a single heap. Preferred embodiments of the present invention work by traversing a set of objects in a heap. During this traversal, sets of strongly connected components are identified. Additionally, representative objects of the sets of strongly connected components are identified and a topological sort order of the objects is established. Further, during a second traversal of the objects, the topological sort order is used to identify one or more applications responsible for each of the strongly connected component sets. And, in the process, the resource usage of each application is computed.