Realisation of a Dynamically Grouped Object-Oriented Virtual Memory Hierarchy

Conventional paging systems do not perform well with large object-oriented environments (such as Smalltalk-801 [GR83]) due to the fine granularity of objects and the persistence of the object space. One approach taken to increase efficiency has been to group objects together in virtual space in an attempt to keep related objects on the same page. Conventionally, grouping has been performed whilst the system is inactive with the objects being ordered in virtual space according to a depth- or breadth-first traversal of the graph formed by the pointers between objects. Whilst such static grouping reduces the amount of paging compared with an arbitrarily grouped system [Sta84], it is not sufficiently effective to eliminate the paging problems of large persistent object-oriented applications. As part of current research on architectures for high-performance object-oriented machines, a novel dynamically grouped virtual memory system was developed and extensively simulated. With dynamic grou...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1987
• Where: POS
• Authors: Ifor Williams, Mario Wolczko, T. P. Hopkins
• Keywords: Dynamic Grouping, Dynamic Grouping Strategies, POS 1987, Programming Languages, Static Grouping