The StringHeap class provides two ways to store strings: either as Java strings, or by copying characters onto a character heap. The second option is only used for deserialization from a binary CAS. However, even if not used, this capability means a very significant memory overhead. To demonstrate this, I ran the following experiment. As analysis engine, I used our sandbox POS tagger. It sets just one string feature on each token. As text, I used a 2.4MB input file (2x moby.txt). To run this in IBM Java 1.5.0_7 (which happens to be the JVM I'm interested in) you need to specify -Xmx135M. I checked 5MB increments. The I patched the StringHeap implementation to work without the additional book keeping overhead and ran the experiment again. I was then able to run with -Xmx115M. This represents a very significant gain, particularly given the fact that I ran so little analysis (only tokens and sentences are produced, and only a single string-valued feature set). The new code also ran a tiny bit faster, but not much. One might see more improvement for analysis that is not as compute intensive as the Tagger.
The challenge is to make sure that the serialization code still works after this change.
Improvement
Closed
Major
Remove char heap/ref heap in StringHeap of the CAS
