Utilization of Separate Caches to Eliminate Cache Pollution Caused by Memory Management Functions

Data intensive service functions such as memory allocation/de-allocation, data prefetching, and data relocation can pollute processor cache in conventional systems since the same CPU (using the same cache) executes both application code and system services. In this paper we show the improvements in cache performance that can result from the elimination of the cache pollution using separate caches for memory management functions. For the purpose of our study we simulate the existence of separate hardware units for the application and the memory management services using two Unix processes. One process executes application code (simulating main CPU) while the other executes memory management code. We collected address traces for the two processes and used Dinero IV cache simulator to evaluate the expected cache behaviors. A second goal of this paper is to examine the cache performance of different memory allocators. In this paper we compare two allocators: a very popular segregated list based allocator (originally due to Doug Lea) and our own binary-tree based allocator (called Address-ordered Binary Tree).

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