Effective prefetch for mark-sweep garbage collection

Robin Garner*, Stephen M. Blackburn, Daniel Frampton

*Corresponding author for this work

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

    21 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Garbage collection is a performance-critical feature of most modern object oriented languages, and is characterized by poor locality since it must traverse the heap. In this paper we show that by combining two very simple ideas we can significantly improve the performance of the canonical mark-sweep collector, resulting in improvements in application performance. We make three main contributions: 1) we develop a methodology and framework for accurately and deterministically analyzing the tracing loop at the heart of the collector, 2) we offer a number of insights and improvements over conventional design choices for mark-sweep collectors, and 3) we find that two simple ideas - edge order traversal and software prefetch - combine to greatly improve garbage collection performance although each is unproductive in isolation. We perform a thorough analysis in the context of MMTk and Jikes RVM on a wide range of benchmarks and four different architectures. Our baseline system (which includes a number of our improvements) is very competitive with highly tuned alternatives. We show a simple marking mechanism which offers modest but consistent improvements over conventional choices. Finally, we show that enqueuing the edges (pointers) of the object graph rather than the nodes (objects) significantly increases opportunities for software prefetch, despite increasing the total number of queue operations. Combining edge ordered enqueuing with software prefetching yields average performance improvements over a large suite of benchmarks of 20-30% in garbage collection time and 4-6% of total application performance in moderate heaps, across four architectures.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationISMM'07
    Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Memory Management
    Pages43-54
    Number of pages12
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2007
    EventISMM'07: 2007 International Symposium on Memory Management - Montreal, QC, Canada
    Duration: 21 Oct 200722 Oct 2007

    Publication series

    NameInternational Symposium on Memory Management, ISMM

    Conference

    ConferenceISMM'07: 2007 International Symposium on Memory Management
    Country/TerritoryCanada
    CityMontreal, QC
    Period21/10/0722/10/07

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