Title
Low cost working set size tracking
Abstract
Efficient memory resource management requires knowledge of the memory demands of applications or systems at runtime. A widely proposed approach is to construct an LRU-based miss ratio curve (MRC), which provides not only the current working set size (WSS) but also the relationship between performance and target memory allocation size. Unfortunately, the cost of LRUMRC monitoring is nontrivial. Although optimized with AVL-tree based LRU structure and dynamic hot set sizing, the overhead is still as high as 16% on average. Based on a key insight that for most programs the WSSs are stable most of the time, we design an intermittent tracking scheme, which can temporarily turn off memory tracking when memory demands are predicted to be stable. With the assistance of hardware performance counters, memory tracking can be turned on again if a significant change in memory demands is expected. Experimental results show that, by using this intermittent tracking design, memory tracking can be turned off for 82% of the execution time while the accuracy loss is no more than 4%. More importantly, this design is orthogonal to existing optimizing techniques, such as AVL-tree based LRU structure and dynamic hot set sizing. By combining the three approaches, the mean overhead is lowered to only 2%. We show that when applied to memory balancing for virtual machines, our scheme brings a speedup of 1.85.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2011
USENIX Annual Technical Conference
size tracking,target memory allocation size,dynamic hot set sizing,memory tracking,execution time,intermittent tracking scheme,low cost,efficient memory resource management,lru structure,intermittent tracking design,memory balancing,memory demand
Field
DocType
Citations 
Interleaved memory,Uniform memory access,Virtual machine,Computer science,Parallel computing,Distributed memory,Real-time computing,Memory management,Sizing,Working set size,Speedup
Conference
20
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.74
8
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Weiming Zhao1200.74
Xinxin Jin21407.49
Zhenlin Wang315015.89
Xiaolin Wang415531.70
Yingwei Luo531541.30
Xiaoming Li6166992.16