Don't race the memory bus: Taming the GC leadfoot

Ahmed Hussein, Antony L. Hosking, Mathias Payer, Christopher A. Vick

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is ubiquitous on mobile devices as a mechanism for saving energy. Reducing the clock frequency of a processor allows a corresponding reduction in power consumption, as does turning off idle cores. Garbage collection is a canonical example of the sort of memory-bound workload that best responds to such scaling. Here, we explore the impact of frequency scaling for garbage collection in a real mobile device running Android's Dalvik virtual machine, which uses a concurrent collector. By controlling the frequency of the core on which the concurrent collector thread runs we can reduce power significantly. Running established multi-threaded benchmarks shows that total processor energy can be reduced up to 30%, with end-to-end performance loss of at most 10 %.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management, co-located with PLDI 2015
Subtitle of host publicationISMM 2015
EditorsMichael Bond, Antony L. Hosking
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages15-27
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450335898
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 14 Jun 2015
Externally publishedYes
Event14th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management, ISMM 2015 - Portland, United States
Duration: 14 Jun 2015 → …

Publication series

NameInternational Symposium on Memory Management, ISMM
Volume14-June-2015

Conference

Conference14th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management, ISMM 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPortland
Period14/06/15 → …

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