On improving heap memory layout by dynamic pool allocation

Dynamic memory allocation is widely used in modern programs. General-purpose heap allocators often focus more on reducing their run-time overhead and memory space utilization, but less on exploiting the characteristics of their allocated heap objects. This paper presents a lightweight dynamic optimizer, named Dynamic Pool Allocation (DPA), which aims to exploit the affinity of the allocated heap objects and improve their layout at run-time. DPA uses an adaptive partial call chain with heuristics to aggregate affinitive heap objects into dedicated memory regions, called memory pools. We examine the factors that could affect the effectiveness of such layout. We have implemented DPA and measured its performance on several SPEC CPU 2000 and 2006 benchmarks that use extensive heap objects. Evaluations show that it could achieve an average speed up of 12.1% and 10.8% on two x86 commodity machines respectively using GCC -O3, and up to 82.2% for some benchmarks. Categories and Subject Descrip...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CGO
• Authors: Zhenjiang Wang, Chenggang Wu, Pen-Chung Yew
• Keywords: CGO 2010, General-purpose Heap Allocators, Heap Objects, Pool Allocation, Software Engineering