A self-adjusting code cache manager to balance start-up time and memory usage

  • Authors:

  • Witawas Srisa-an;Myra B. Cohen;Yu Shang;Mithuna Soundararaj

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA;University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA;University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA;University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th annual IEEE/ACM international symposium on Code generation and optimization
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In virtual machines for embedded devices that use just-in-time compilation, the management of the code cache can significantly impact performance in terms of both memory usage and start-up time. Although improving memory usage has been a common focus for system designers, start-up time is often overlooked. In systems with constrained resources, however, these two performance metrics are often at odds and must be considered together. In this paper, we present an adaptive self-adjusting code cache manager to improve performance with respect to both start-up time and memory usage. It balances these concerns by detecting changes in method compilation rates, resizing the cache after each pitching event. We conduct experiments to validate our proposed system and quantify the impacts that different code cache management techniques have on memory usage and start-up time through two oracle systems. Our results show that the proposed algorithm yields nearly the same start-up times as a hand-tuned oracle and shorter execution times than those of the SSCLI in eight out of ten applications. It also has lower memory usage over time in all but one application.