Finding reusable data structures

  • Authors:

  • Guoqing Xu

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
  • Year:
  • 2012

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

A big source of run-time performance problems in large-scale, object-oriented applications is the frequent creation of data structures (by the same allocation site) whose lifetimes are disjoint, and whose shapes and data content are always the same. Constructing these data structures and computing the same data values many times is expensive; significant performance improvements can be achieved by reusing their instances, shapes, and/or data values rather than reconstructing them. This paper presents a run-time technique that can be used to help programmers find allocation sites that create such data structures to improve performance. At the heart of the technique are three reusability definitions and novel summarization approaches that compute summaries for data structures based on these definitions. The computed summaries are used subsequently to find data structures that have disjoint lifetimes, and/or that have the same shapes and content. We have implemented this technique in the Jikes RVM and performed extensive studies on large-scale, real-world programs. We describe our experience using six case studies, in which we have achieved large performance gains by fixing problems reported by our tool.