TY - GEN
T1 - Continuously measuring critical section pressure with the Free-Lunch profiler
AU - David, Florian
AU - Thomas, Gaël
AU - Lawall, Julia
AU - Muller, Gilles
PY - 2014/10/15
Y1 - 2014/10/15
N2 - Today, Java is regularly used to implement large multithreaded server-class applications that use locks to protect access to shared data. However, understanding the impact of locks on the performance of a system is complex, and thus the use of locks can impede the progress of threads on configurations that were not anticipated by the developer, during specific phases of the execution. In this paper, we propose Free Lunch, a new lock profiler for Java application servers, specifically designed to identify, in-vivo, phases where the progress of the threads is impeded by a lock. Free Lunch is designed around a new metric, critical section pressure (CSP), which directly correlates the progress of the threads to each of the locks. Using Free Lunch, we have identified phases of high CSP, which were hidden with other lock profilers, in the distributed Cassandra NoSQL database and in several applications from the DaCapo 9.12, the SPECjvm-2008 and the SPECjbb2005 benchmark suites. Our evaluation of Free Lunch shows that its overhead is never greater than 6%, making it suitable for in-vivo use.
AB - Today, Java is regularly used to implement large multithreaded server-class applications that use locks to protect access to shared data. However, understanding the impact of locks on the performance of a system is complex, and thus the use of locks can impede the progress of threads on configurations that were not anticipated by the developer, during specific phases of the execution. In this paper, we propose Free Lunch, a new lock profiler for Java application servers, specifically designed to identify, in-vivo, phases where the progress of the threads is impeded by a lock. Free Lunch is designed around a new metric, critical section pressure (CSP), which directly correlates the progress of the threads to each of the locks. Using Free Lunch, we have identified phases of high CSP, which were hidden with other lock profilers, in the distributed Cassandra NoSQL database and in several applications from the DaCapo 9.12, the SPECjvm-2008 and the SPECjbb2005 benchmark suites. Our evaluation of Free Lunch shows that its overhead is never greater than 6%, making it suitable for in-vivo use.
KW - Java
KW - Locks
KW - Multicore
KW - Performance analysis
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84908281687
U2 - 10.1145/2660193.2660210
DO - 10.1145/2660193.2660210
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84908281687
T3 - Proceedings of the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA
SP - 291
EP - 307
BT - Proceedings of the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 2014 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2014
Y2 - 20 October 2014 through 24 October 2014
ER -