Page Pinning Improves Performance of Generational Garbage Collection

Garbage collection became widely used with the growing popularity of the Java programming language. For garbage-collected programs, memory latency is an important performance factor. Thus, a reduction in the cache miss rate will boost performance. In most programs, the majority of references are to newly allocated objects (the nursery). This work evaluates a page-mapping strategy that pins the nursery in a portion of the L2 cache. Pinning maps nursery pages in a way that prevents conflict misses for them, but increases the number of conflict misses for other objects. Cache performance is measured by the miss-rate improvement and speedup obtained by pinning on the SPECjvm98 and the DaCapo benchmarks. Pinning is shown to produce a lower global miss rate than competing virtual-memory mapping strategies, such as page coloring and bin hopping. This improvement in miss rate shortens overall execution time for practically every benchmark and every configuration. Pinning greatly reduces average pause time and variability of pause times for nursery collections.

Author dc:creator

• Sawyer, Richard Kevin

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Dr. Edward F. Gehringer, Committee Chair
• Dr. Gregory T. Byrd, Committee Member
• Dr. Suleyman Sair, Committee Member

• pinning
• garbage collection
• cache
• speedup
• miss rate
• generational garbage collection
• Jikes
• Dynamic SimpleScalar
• DaCapo
• SpecJVM98

Statement dc:rights

• I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to NC State University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

Dc Identifier Other

etd-03262006-232725

OAI record oai:identifier

https://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Arepository.lib.ncsu.edu%3A1840.16%2F209