Memory system performance of programs with intensive heap allocation

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Abstract
Heap allocation with copying garbage collection is a general storage management technique for programming languages. It is believed to have poor memory system performance. To investigate this, we conducted an in-depth study of the memory system performance of heap allocation for memory systems found on many machines. We studied the performance of mostly functional Standard ML programs which made heavy use of heap allocation. We found that most machines support heap allocation poorly. However, with the appropriate memory system organization, heap allocation can have good performance. The memory system property crucial for achieving good performance was the ability to allocate and initialize a new object into the cache without a penalty. This can be achieved by having subblock by placement with a subblock size of one word with a write-allocate policy, along with fast page-mode writes or a write buffer. For caches with subblock placement, the data cache overhead was under 9% for a 64K or larger data cache; without subblock placement the overhead was often higher than 50%.

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