The Effect of Garbage Collection on Cache Performance
Abstract
Cache performance is an important part of total performance in modern computer systems. This paper describes the use of trace-driven simulation to estimate the effect of garbage collection algorithms on cache performance Traces from four large Common Lisp programs have been collected and analyzed with an all-associatively cache simulator. While previous work has focused on the effect of garbage collection on page reference locality this evaluation unambiguously shows that garbage collection algorithms can have a profound effect on cache performance as well. On processors with a direct-mapped cache a generation stop-and-copy algorithm exhibits a miss rate up to four times higher than a comparable generation mark-and-sweep algorithm. Furthermore, two-way set-associative caches are shown to reduce the miss rate in stop-and-copy algorithms often by a factor of two and sometimes by a factor of almost five over direct-mapped caches. As processor speeds increase, cache performance will play an increasing role in total performance. These results suggest that garbage collection algorithms will play an important part in improving that performance.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 01, 1991
- Accession Number
- ADA444548
Entities
People
- Benjamin Zorn
Organizations
- University of Colorado Boulder