Rei Odaira           

VEE 2010 Paper

Efficient Runtime Tracking of Allocation Sites in Java.
Rei Odaira, Kazunori Ogata, Kiyokuni Kawachiya, Tamiya Onodera, and Toshio Nakatani.
In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE), pp.109-120, 2010.

Full text [PDF]: VEE2010_AllocationSite.pdf
Slides [PDF]: VEE2010_AllocationSite_Slides.pdf

Abstract

Tracking the allocation site of every object at runtime is useful for reliable, optimized Java. To be used in production environments, the tracking must be accurate with minimal speed loss. Previous approaches suffer from performance degradation due to the additional field added to each object or track the allocation sites only probabilistically. We propose two novel approaches to track the allocation sites of every object in Java with only a 1.0% slow-down on average. Our first approach, the Allocation-Site-as-a-Hash-code (ASH) Tracker, encodes the allocation site ID of an object into the hash code field of its header by regarding the ID as part of the hash code. ASH Tracker avoids an excessive increase in hash code collisions by dynamically shrinking the bit-length of the ID as more and more objects are allocated at that site. For those Java VMs without the hash code field, our second approach, the Allocation-Site-via-a-Class-pointer (ASC) Tracker, makes the class pointer field in an object header refer to the allocation site structure of the object, which in turn points to the actual class structure. ASC Tracker mitigates the indirection overhead by constant-class-field duplication and allocation-site equality checks. While a previous approach of adding a 4-byte field caused up to 14.4% and an average 5% slowdown, both ASH and ASC Trackers incur at most a 2.0% and an average 1.0% loss. We demonstrate the usefulness of our low-overhead trackers by an allocation-site-aware memory leak detector and allocation-site-based pretenuring in generational GC. Our pretenuring achieved on average 1.8% and up to 11.8% speedups in SPECjvm2008.

Copyright

Copyright (C) 2010 by Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part of all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.