PERFORMANCE OF OBJECT CACHING FOR OBJECT-ORIENTED SYSTEMS

Object-oriented systems exhibit a very high rate of object creation, but most of the objects are short-lived. As a result, memory-management overhead is significant. This paper describes an application-specific coprocessor architecture to speed up object creation and memory reclamation in object-oriented systems. The architecture supports a bit-vector approach to dynamic storage allocation and liberation. Newly created objects reside in a cache which is reference counted. Simulation results show that 50% to 70% of objects die before they age out of the cache, drastically reducing the number of references to main memory. More than 60% of overall memory traffic is saved by the proposed scheme. Many existing computer architectures would require only minor compiler modification to incorporate and benefit from this coprocessor.