Automatic Tuning of Inlining Heuristics

Inlining improves the performance of programs by reducing the overhead of method invocation and increasing the opportunities for compiler optimization. Incorrect inlining decisions, however, can degrade both the running and compilation time of a program. This is especially important for a dynamically compiled language such as Java. Therefore, the heuristics that control inlining must be carefully tuned to achieve a good balance between these two costs to reduce overall total execution time. This paper develops a genetic algorithms based approach to automatically tune a dynamic compiler’s internal inlining heuristic. We evaluate our technique within the Jikes RVM [1] compiler and show a 17% average reduction in total execution time on the SPECjvm98 benchmark suite on a Pentium-4. When applied to the DaCapo benchmark suite, our approach reduces total execution time by 37%% outperforming all existing techniques.