Can a Shape Analysis Work at Run-time?

A shape analysis is a whole-program analysis that can identify run-time objects that do not need to be placed in the global heap and do not require any locking. Previous research has shown that these two optimizations can speed up some applications significantly. Unfortunately, since a shape analysis--like any whole-program analysis--requires a priori knowledge of the complete call graph, it has not been implemented in a JVM, which essentially builds the call graph as a program executes. In this paper, we adapt an efficient shape analysis to be incremental so that it can analyze an executing program. We investigate trade-offs regarding three approaches to performing the analysis inside a JVM and report results on a number of applications. Our measurements suggest that such an analysis may be viable if it uses results of previous executions and if it delays the initial analysis until the end of the first execution.

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