HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVREYONE.

Cheers,

PhiHo.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John M McIntosh" <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Monday, December 30, 2002 3:27 AM
Subject: [ENH][VM][FIX] faster garbage collection, and removal of unused
vars


> This change set provides a 18 - 28% improvement in the GC logic using
> an test image that has 1.1 million objects in it on the PowerPC.
> I won't comment on if this makes any difference on intel, however
> someone might try it and see what happens.
>
> In early December I took a look at the garbage collector and realized
> for the mark logic, at least on the PowerPC, we were moving three key
> variables  in and out of memory multiple times per object, versus
> keeping everything in a register or two. Also we managed to make some
> procedure calls for each object we looked at, which is time consuming.
>
> In discussing a possible fix with Tim, we realized that in some cases
> because of inlining, why some global variables actually become local
> variables because different SLANG methods are folded together.
>
> This change set add logic to review variable usage and if possible fold
> variables that only appear in one inlined method into a declaration
> within the one method and dropped them from the globals. Right now I
> only deal with interp.c, and I've not really studied say variables
> across N methods where N is > 2 but say < 6 to understand what could be
> done with a bit more tweaking.
>
> Interesting enough these variables are:
> field, parentField, child in the Mark Logic
> cntx, val in the interpret routine.
>
> A bit of slang changing was also done to:
>
> 1) Provide an array headerTypeBytes, a lookup array for the header byte
> length calculation versus doing a couple of IF statements.
> 2) A few restructuring hints to ensure procedure calls actually become
> inlined, where in the past they violated an inlining rule.
> 3) Some really large routines in the compacting logic were broken into
> multiple routines, because the logic is really in multiple steps and
> this helps the compiler (ah stupid compilers) deal with register
> allocation better. Also it helps one think about why we have multiple
> steps.
>
> I think a bit more work could be done in this area, but I'll look for
> feedback first.
>
> Also I've moved the logic from voidIsNotInt that dealt with ensuring
> bogus unused variables are deleted into this change set.
>
> Now for the Globals as a structure logic, I've attached an addendum
> change set (GCMakeItFasterGStruct-JMM.6.cs.gz) to provide the following
> feature: Declare foo as a pointer to the foo structure as a local, this
> makes for better powerpc code which improves overall performance by a
> few percentage points. You also need this changeset because of some
> structure changes if you've filed in the globals as a structure changes
> sets, and want the faster GC speed.
>
> --
> ========================================================================
> ===
> John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
> Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
> ========================================================================
> ===
>