MemLiner: Lining up Tracing and Application for a Far-Memory-Friendly Runtime

Far-memory techniques that enable applications to use remote memory are increasingly appealing in modern data centers, supporting applications' large memory footprint and improving machines' resource utilization. Unfortunately, most far-memory techniques focus on OS-level optimizations and are agnostic to managed runtimes and garbage collections (GC) underneath applications written in high-level languages. With different object-access patterns from applications, GC can severely interfere with existing far-memory techniques, breaking remote memory prefetching algorithms and causing severe local-memory misses.

We developed MemLiner, a runtime technique that improves the performance of far-memory systems by "lining up" memory accesses from the application and the GC so that they follow similar memory access paths, thereby (1) reducing the local-memory working set and (2) improving remote-memory prefetching through simplified memory access patterns. We implemented MemLiner in two widely-used GCs in Open-JDK: G1 and Shenandoah. Our evaluation with a range of widely-deployed cloud systems shows MemLiner improves applications' end-to-end performance by up to 2.5×. Aligned Working Set App Thread App Thread GC Tracing Thread (a) Current runtime (b) MemLiner runtime GC Working Set App Working Set