Method-specific dynamic compilation using logistic regression

  • Authors:
  • John Cavazos;Michael F. P. O'Boyle

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom;University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Determining the best set of optimizations to apply to a program has been a long standing problem for compiler writers. To reduce the complexity of this task, existing approaches typically apply the same set of optimizations to all procedures within a program, without regard to their particular structure. This paper develops a new method-specific approach that automatically selects the best optimizations on a per method basis within a dynamic compiler. Our approach uses the machine learning technique of logistic regression to automatically derive a predictive model that determines which optimizations to apply based on the features of a method. This technique is implemented in the Jikes RVM Java JIT compiler. Using this approach we reduce the average total execution time of the SPECjvm98 benchmarks by 29%. When the same heuristic is applied to the DaCapo+ benchmark suite, we obtain an average 33% reduction over the default level O2 setting.