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Pretenuring for Java
Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2001) (2001)
  • Eliot B. Moss
Abstract

Pretenuring can reduce copying costs in garbage collectors by allocating long-lived objects into regions that the garbage collector will rarely, if ever, collect. We extend previous work on pretenuring as follows. (1) We produce pretenuring advice that is neutral with respect to the garbage collector algorithm and configuration. We thus can and do combine advice from different applications. We find that predictions using object lifetimes at each allocation site in Java programs are accurate, which simplifies the pretenuring implementation. (2) We gather and apply advice to applications and the Jalape ˜no JVM, a compiler and run-time system for Java written in Java. Our results demonstrate that building combined advice into Jalape ˜no from different application executions improves performance regardless of the application Jalape˜no is compiling and executing. This build-time advice thus gives user applications some benefits of pretenuring without any application profiling. No previous work pretenures in the run-time system. (3) We find that applicationonly advice also improves performance, but that the combination of build-time and application-specific advice is almost always noticeably better. (4) Our same advice improves the performance of generational and Older First collection, illustrating that it is collector neutral.

Keywords
  • Garbage collection,
  • pretenuring,
  • lifetime prediction,
  • profiling
Disciplines
Publication Date
November, 2001
Citation Information
Eliot B. Moss. "Pretenuring for Java" Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2001) (2001)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/eliot_moss/35/