[Vm-dev] A gprof listing of memory access functions in the interpreter

Andrew Gaylard ag at computer.org
Mon Jul 21 11:55:20 UTC 2008


On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 11:49 PM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com>
wrote:

>
> I don't know if this is of any general interest, but attached is a
> gprof output listing of a Squeak VM with the memory access routines
> from sqMemoryAccess.h recoded in Slang.
>
> I now have the Slang inlining working so that it can fully inline all
> of these methods. With the Slang inlining activiated, performance is
> essentially identical to that of the normal macros in sqMemoryAccess.h.
> By turning the Slang inlining off, the functions are all called
> individually, which is what I used to generated the attached profile.
>
> The host is 64-bit Linux AMD. The profile was run by opening a largish
> image, running "0 tinyBenchmarks" a half dozen times, and exiting the
> image without saving.
>
> So far, the advantages of putting the memory access routines into
> the image as Slang seem to be:
> - You can step into the methods in a debugger
> - The methods can be profiled
> - Exposes type declaration problems previously hidden by the macros
>
> Is anyone interested in this?
>
> Dave


Yeah, I'm interested in this.  I'm always interested in speeding up the
interpreter.

What I find interesting is that there's no particular hot spot in the
profile. I find
that profiling typically reveals a single function taking up 50+% of the
runtime,
but that isn't the case here.  There's a fairly even tail.

Even if we *doubled* the speed of interpret() and pointerForOop(), we'd
still
only gain a 20% speed-up.

So there's isn't any easy improvement, unless I misunderstand the data
(which is quite possible!).  To gain significant speed-ups, we'd have to
make
hundreds of micro-optimisations throughout the code-base, which would
probably complicate the code (which is pretty clean at the moment).

Andrew
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