An automatic object inlining optimization and its evaluation

ABSTRACT

Automatic object inlining [19, 20] transforms heap data structures by fusing parent and child objects together. It can improve runtime by reducing object allocation and pointer dereference costs. We report continuing work studying object inlining optimizations. In particular, we present a new semantic derivation of the correctness conditions for object inlining, and program analysis which extends our previous work. And we present an object inlining transformation, focusing on a new algorithm which optimizes class field layout to minimize code expansion. Finally, we detail a fuller evaluation on eleven programs and libraries (including Xpdf, the 25,000 line Portable Document Format (PDF) file browser) that utilizes hardware measures of impact on the memory system.

We show that our analysis scales effectively to large programs, finding many inlinable fields (45 in xpdf) at acceptable cost, and we show that, on some programs, it finds nearly all fields for which object inlining is correct, and averages 40% of such fields across our benchmarks. We implement our analyses in an advanced analysis infrastructure, and we show that, compared to traditional 1-CFA, that infrastructure provides better results and lower and more scalable cost. Across all programs, analysis identified about 30% of objects as inlinable on average. Our transformation increases code size by only 20% while inlining this 30% of fields. Inlining these objects eliminated on average 28% of field reads, 58% of object creations, 12% of all loads. Further, the optimized programs have significantly improved memory reference behavior, producing 25% fewer L1 data cache misses and 25% fewer read stalls. On average the runtime improved by 14%.

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Index Terms

• General and reference

  • Cross-computing tools and techniques

    • Verification

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Designing software

      • Software implementation planning

        • Software design techniques

    • Software development process management

    • Software verification and validation

      • Formal software verification

  • Software notations and tools

    • Compilers

  • Software organization and properties

    • Software functional properties

      • Formal methods

        • Software verification

• Theory of computation

  • Semantics and reasoning

    • Program reasoning

      • Program verification