Techniques in Optimizing Memory-Intensive Applications

• Main Authors: Shian-Shuen Tseng, 曾賢舜
• Other Authors: 廖世煒
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/20586878118389802518

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 資訊工程學研究所 === 97 === Memory management is the act of governing the memory sub-system in computers. Generally, memory management software involves the ways to allocate portions of memory requests by programs and recycle the memory when it is no longer needed. Due to the Memory Wall problem, memory management has been an important research topic to boost the performance of computer systems. In this thesis, the performance of different memory management strategies at different levels is evaluated. Several practical methods for memory management are provided to boost the system performance. First, the experiments were done to evaluate the performance of memory copy operations with different configurations. From empirical experiments, we found that with proper configuration, the performance of memory copy operation can achieve about 8% speedup as compared with the default configuration. On the other hand, if the configuration is not chosen judiciously, the performance delivered by the best configuration, which is not obvious to find, can be 3.94 times faster than the worst configuration. Second, we evaluated the performance of Garbage Collection mechanism implemented in Android’s Dalvik virtual machine. The speed of garbage collecting operation is improved up to 67% compared to original design. Finally, the memory allocation mechanism in Dalvik is studied as well. The speed of memory allocation operation is accelerated by up to 43%.