Evaluation of an object-caching coprocessor design 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. The paper evaluates 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. The paper presents measurements of the performance of this coprocessor design. Simulation results show that 50% to 70% of objects die before they age out of the cache, greatly reducing the number of references to main memory. Overall, more than 60% of memory traffic is saved by the proposed scheme, and the interval between main-memory garbage collections is extended by more than 60%