Title :
Reducing the virtual memory overhead of swizzling
Author :
Narasayya, Vivek ; Ng, Tze Sing Eugene ; McNamee, Dylan ; Tiwary, Ashutosh ; Levy, Hank
Author_Institution :
Washington Univ., Seattle, WA, USA
Abstract :
Swizzling is a mechanism used by OODBs and persistent object systems to convert pointers from their disk format to a more efficient in-memory format. Previous studies of swizzling have focused on analyzing the CPU overhead of pointer translation and studying trade-offs in different approaches to swizzling. In this paper we show that there is an additional indirect but important cost associated with swizzling: swizzling a read-only page causes it to be “dirty” with respect to the operating system. At the onset of paging, these read-only pages may be written to the swap file unnecessarily. We propose a simple modification to the operating system that reduces the impact of this overhead on application performance
Keywords :
object-oriented databases; virtual storage; CPU overhead; OODBs; application performance; in-memory format; operating system; persistent object systems; pointer translation; pointers; read-only page; swap file; swizzling; virtual memory overhead; Application software; CADCAM; Computer aided manufacturing; Computer aided software engineering; Costs; Design automation; Hardware; Object oriented databases; Operating systems; Virtual manufacturing;
Conference_Titel :
Object-Orientation in Operating Systems, 1996., Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on
Conference_Location :
Seattle, WA
Print_ISBN :
0-8186-7692-2
DOI :
10.1109/IWOOOS.1996.557893