research-article

On improving heap memory layout by dynamic pool allocation

Authors:

Zhenjiang Wang,

Pen-Chung YewAuthors Info & Claims

CGO '10: Proceedings of the 8th annual IEEE/ACM international symposium on Code generation and optimization

Pages 92 - 100

https://doi.org/10.1145/1772954.1772969

Published: 24 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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Cited By

Mamatha Ananda CGupta RTallam SShen HLi XDoerfert JGrosser TLeather HSadayappan P(2025)PreFix: Optimizing the Performance of Heap-Intensive ApplicationsProceedings of the 23rd ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1145/3696443.3708960(405-417)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3696443.3708960
Savage JJones TMars JTang LXue JWu P(2020)HALO: post-link heap-layout optimisationProceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1145/3368826.3377914(94-106)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368826.3377914
Effler TKammerdiener BJantz MSengupta SKulkarni PDoshi KJones T(2019)Evaluating the effectiveness of program data features for guiding memory managementProceedings of the International Symposium on Memory Systems10.1145/3357526.3357537(383-395)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3357526.3357537
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

On improving heap memory layout by dynamic pool allocation
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Memory management
        Allocation / deallocation strategies

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cover image ACM Conferences

CGO '10: Proceedings of the 8th annual IEEE/ACM international symposium on Code generation and optimization

April 2010

300 pages

ISBN:9781605586359

DOI:10.1145/1772954

General Chairs:
Andreas Moshovos
University of Toronto
,
Greg Steffan
University of Toronto
,
Program Chairs:
Kim Hazelwood
University of Virginia
,
David Kaeli
Northeastern University

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 24 April 2010

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CGO '10: 8th Annual IEEE/ ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization

April 24 - 28, 2010

Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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Overall Acceptance Rate 312 of 1,061 submissions, 29%

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Cited By

Mamatha Ananda CGupta RTallam SShen HLi XDoerfert JGrosser TLeather HSadayappan P(2025)PreFix: Optimizing the Performance of Heap-Intensive ApplicationsProceedings of the 23rd ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1145/3696443.3708960(405-417)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3696443.3708960
Savage JJones TMars JTang LXue JWu P(2020)HALO: post-link heap-layout optimisationProceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1145/3368826.3377914(94-106)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368826.3377914
Effler TKammerdiener BJantz MSengupta SKulkarni PDoshi KJones T(2019)Evaluating the effectiveness of program data features for guiding memory managementProceedings of the International Symposium on Memory Systems10.1145/3357526.3357537(383-395)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3357526.3357537
Li PLuo HDing CSinger JXu H(2019)Timescale functions for parallel memory allocationProceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management10.1145/3315573.3329987(64-78)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3315573.3329987
Franco JHagelin MWrigstad TDrossopoulou SEisenbach STorlak EStorm TBiddle R(2017)You can have it all: abstraction and good cache performanceProceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3133850.3133861(148-167)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3133850.3133861
Liao XGuo RJin HYue JTan G(2017)Enhancing the Malloc System with Pollution Awareness for Better Cache PerformanceIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2016.258764428:3(731-745)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TPDS.2016.2587644
Li PLuo HDing C(2016)Rethinking a heap hierarchy as a cache hierarchy: a higher-order theory of memory demand (HOTM)ACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3241624.292670851:11(111-121)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3241624.2926708
Li PLuo HDing CFlood CZhang Z(2016)Rethinking a heap hierarchy as a cache hierarchy: a higher-order theory of memory demand (HOTM)Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management10.1145/2926697.2926708(111-121)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2926697.2926708
Jo YKulkarni M(2012)Automatically enhancing locality for tree traversals with traversal splicingACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2398857.238464347:10(355-374)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2398857.2384643
Jo YKulkarni MLeavens GDwyer M(2012)Automatically enhancing locality for tree traversals with traversal splicingProceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications10.1145/2384616.2384643(355-374)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2012
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