Towards an Efficient Pauseless Java GC with Selective HTM-Based Access Barriers

Carpen-Amarie, Maria; Hayduk, Yaroslav; Felber, Pascal; Fetzer, Christof; Thomas, Gaël; Dice, Dave

doi:10.1145/3132190.3132208

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Historically, GCs harmed application performance due to unacceptably long stop-theworld (STW) pauses. To reduce the performance overhead and responsiveness issues created by STW events, significant effort was put into re-designing and implementing more efficient GCs [7,12,16,22,26,28,29]. Therefore, most modern GCs [10,32] have increasingly shorter pauses, while performing most of the work concurrently with the application threads (e.g., ZGC [32]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Concurrent GCs and Modern Java Workloads: A Cache Perspective

Carpen-Amarie¹,

Vavouliotis²,

Tovletoglou³

et al. 2023

Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management

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The garbage collector (GC) is a crucial component of language runtimes, offering correctness guarantees and high productivity in exchange for a run-time overhead. Concurrent collectors run alongside application threads (mutators) and share CPU resources. A likely point of contention between mutators and GC threads and, consequently, a potential overhead source is the shared last-level cache (LLC).This work builds on the hypothesis that the cache pollution caused by concurrent GCs hurts application performance. We validate this hypothesis with a cache-sensitive Java micro-benchmark. We find that concurrent GC activity may slow down the application by up to 3 × and increase the LLC misses by 3 orders of magnitude. However, when we extend our analysis to a suite of benchmarks representative for today's server workloads (Renaissance), we find that only 5 out of 23 benchmarks show a statistically significant correlation between GC-induced cache pollution and performance. Even for these, the performance overhead of GC does not exceed 10 %. Based on further analysis, we conclude that the lower impact of the GC on the performance of Renaissance benchmarks is due to their lack of sensitivity to LLC capacity. CCS Concepts:• Software and its engineering → Runtime environments; Garbage collection; • Computer systems organization → Multicore architectures.

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