A page fault equation for dynamic heap sizing

For garbage-collected applications, dynamically-allocated objects are contained in a heap. Programmer productivity improves significantly if there is a garbage collector to automatically de-allocate objects that are no longer needed by the applications. However, there is a run-time performance overhead in garbage collection, and this cost is sensitive to heap size H: a smaller H will trigger more collection, but a large H can cause page faults, as when H exceeds the size M of main memory allocated to the application. This paper presents a Heap Sizing Rule for how H should vary with M. The Rule can help an application trade less page faults for more garbage collection, thus reducing execution time. It is based on a heap-aware Page Fault Equation that models how the number of page faults depends on H and M. Experiments show that this rule outperforms the default policy used by JikesRVM’s heap size manager. Specifically, the number of faults and the execution time are reduced for bot...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: WOSP
• Authors: Y. C. Tay, X. R. Zong
• Keywords: Garbage Collection, Heap Sizing Rule, Page Faults, Software Engineering, WOSP 2010