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Documents authored by Mössenböck, Hanspeter

Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.19
Profile-Guided Field Externalization in an Ahead-Of-Time Compiler

Authors: Sebastian Kloibhofer, Lukas Makor, Peter Hofer, David Leopoldseder, and Hanspeter Mössenböck

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 333, 39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025)

Abstract
Field externalization is a technique to reduce the footprint of objects by removing fields that most frequently contain zero or null. While researchers have developed ways to bring this optimization into the Java world, these have been limited to research compilers or virtual machines for embedded systems. In this work, we present a novel field externalization technique that uses information from static analysis and profiling to determine externalizable fields. During compilation, we remove those fields and define companion classes. These are used in case of non-default-value writes to the externalized fields. Our approach also correctly handles synchronization to prevent issues in multithreaded environments. We integrated our approach into the modern Java ahead-of-time compiler GraalVM Native Image. We conducted an evaluation on a diverse set of benchmarks that includes standard and microservice-based benchmarks. For standard benchmarks, our approach reduces the total allocated bytes by 2.76% and the maximum resident set size (max-RSS) by 2.55%. For microservice benchmarks, we achieved a reduction of 6.88% for normalized allocated bytes and 2.45% for max-RSS. We computed these improvements via the geometric mean. The median reductions are are 1.46% (alloc. bytes) and 0.22% (max-RSS) in standard benchmarks, as well as 3.63% (alloc. bytes) and 0.20% (max-RSS) in microservice benchmarks.
Cite as

Sebastian Kloibhofer, Lukas Makor, Peter Hofer, David Leopoldseder, and Hanspeter Mössenböck. Profile-Guided Field Externalization in an Ahead-Of-Time Compiler. In 39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 333, pp. 19:1-19:32, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{kloibhofer_et_al:LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.19,
  author =	{Kloibhofer, Sebastian and Makor, Lukas and Hofer, Peter and Leopoldseder, David and M\"{o}ssenb\"{o}ck, Hanspeter},
  title =	{{Profile-Guided Field Externalization in an Ahead-Of-Time Compiler}},
  booktitle =	{39th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2025)},
  pages =	{19:1--19:32},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-373-7},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{333},
  editor =	{Aldrich, Jonathan and Silva, Alexandra},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.19},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-233121},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2025.19},
  annote =	{Keywords: compilation, instrumentation, profiling, fields, externalization, memory footprint reduction, memory footprint optimization}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.20
Taking a Closer Look: An Outlier-Driven Approach to Compilation-Time Optimization

Authors: Florian Huemer, David Leopoldseder, Aleksandar Prokopec, Raphael Mosaner, and Hanspeter Mössenböck

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 313, 38th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2024)

Abstract
Improving compilation time in optimizing compilers is challenging due to their large number of interconnected components. This includes compiler optimizations, compiler tiers, heuristics, and profiling information. Despite this complexity, research in compilation-time optimization is often guided by analyzing metrics of entire program runs, such as the total compilation time and overall memory footprint. This coarse-grained perspective hides relevant information, such as source program functions for which the compiler allocates a lot of memory or compiler optimizations with a high impact on the total compilation time. This leaves high-level metrics as the only reference point for driving optimization design. Consequently, compilation-time regressions in one program function that are obscured by improvements in other functions stay undetected, while the impacts of compiler changes on untouched parts of the compiler are mainly unknown. Furthermore, developers overlook long-standing compiler defects because their high-level metrics do not change over time. To address these limitations, we propose ICON, a new data-driven approach to compilation-time optimization that breaks up high-level metrics into individual source program functions, compiler optimizations, or even into individual instructions in the compiler source code. Our methodology enables an iterative in-depth compilation-time analysis, focusing on outliers to identify optimization opportunities. We show that outliers, both in terms of time spent in a particular compiler optimization, and in terms of individual compilations that take substantially longer, can reveal potential problems in the compiler implementation. We applied our approach to GraalVM and extracted data for multiple of its language runtimes. We analyzed the resulting data, present the first detailed look into the distribution of compilation time in the GraalVM compiler, a state-of-the-art multi-language compiler, and identified defects that led to regressions in overall compilation time or the compilation time of specific languages. We furthermore designed two optimizations based on the identified outliers that improve compilation time between 2.25% and 9.45%. We believe that our approach can guide compiler developers in finding usually overlooked optimization potential and defects, and focus future research efforts in making compilers more efficient.
Cite as

Florian Huemer, David Leopoldseder, Aleksandar Prokopec, Raphael Mosaner, and Hanspeter Mössenböck. Taking a Closer Look: An Outlier-Driven Approach to Compilation-Time Optimization. In 38th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 313, pp. 20:1-20:28, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)

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@InProceedings{huemer_et_al:LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.20,
  author =	{Huemer, Florian and Leopoldseder, David and Prokopec, Aleksandar and Mosaner, Raphael and M\"{o}ssenb\"{o}ck, Hanspeter},
  title =	{{Taking a Closer Look: An Outlier-Driven Approach to Compilation-Time Optimization}},
  booktitle =	{38th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2024)},
  pages =	{20:1--20:28},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-341-6},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2024},
  volume =	{313},
  editor =	{Aldrich, Jonathan and Salvaneschi, Guido},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.20},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-208693},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.20},
  annote =	{Keywords: Compilation time, outliers, dynamic languages, virtual machines, GraalVM, ICON}
}
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