[HARMONY-6002] Startup cost is high for Harmony

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: DRLVM
• Environment: Windows system. Core 2 Quad-core machine
• Estimated Complexity: Moderate
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Wenlong Li
• Created: 22/Oct/08 14:09
• Updated: 13/Nov/08 07:28

Description

The startup time is long for the simple helloworld program. On a Core 2 Quad-core processor, running the simple helloworld program will take more than 300 ms.

For the startup benchmarks in SPECJVM2008, the startup cost of Harmony is also very high. For example, only several operations can be executed per minute.

I am going to address the startup cost problem. At this moment, there are several approaches in my mind.

(a) Add instrumentation code in Harmony to identify the hot functions. Also use VTune to identify the performance bottleneck
(b) Reduce the number of loaded classes. The startup cost is proportional to the number of loaded classes. This approach may be helpful in improving startup performance, but may not be an effective solution.
(c) Check the class lookup operation, and see whether there is some optimization opportunity.
(d) Check the class file reading, and see whether I/O is the bottleneck.
(e) Check whether memory access affects performance, and apply software prefetch technique

These are my priliminary thoughts, and I would like to hear comments and advice to fix this problem. Any suggestion are welcome and appreciated.

Issue Links

• is related to: HARMONY-5277 [startup][performance] general optimizations