Efficient Hardware Support of Small Block Size Memory Allocation in Java

摘要

Object-oriented paradigm has become the mainstream paradigm on software development due to its attractive features that can effectively divide a complex software problem into several independent modules. One of the object-oriented languages -Java, becomes popular in recent years because it is widely used in the rapid growing Internet computing. However, similar to other object-oriented languages, Java has a big drawback of poor performance. One of the main causes of the performance deficiency is the extensive use of dynamic memory allocations and deallocations during object / array creation and destruction. An analysis on the memory allocation behavior of Java programs shows that nearly 100% of the allocations are of sizes less than 1K bytes. Memory Management Cache (MMC) is proposed to provide an efficient hardware for memory allocation and deallocation in Java runtime environment.