Exposing Memory Access Regularities Using Object-Relative Memory Profiling

Memory profiling is the process of characterizing a program's memory behavior by observing and recording its response to specific input sets. Relevant aspects of the program's memory behavior may then be used to guide memory optimizations in an aggressively optimizing compiler. In general, memory access behavior has eluded meaningful characterization because of confounding artifacts from memory allocators, linker data layout, and OS memory management. Since these artifacts may change from run to run, memory access patterns may appear different in each run even for the same input set. Worse, regular memory access behavior such as linked list traversals appear to have no structure. In this paper we present object-relative translation and decomposition techniques to eliminate these artifacts and to expose previously obscured memory access patterns. To demonstrate the potential of these ideas, we implement two different memory profilers targeted at different sets of applications...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: CGO
• Authors: Qiang Wu, Artem Pyatakov, Alexey Spiridonov, Easwaran Raman, Douglas W. Clark, David I. August
• Keywords: CGO 2004, Memory Access, Memory Access Behavior, Program's Memory Behavior, Software Engineering