Daniel Clifford
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Preview abstract
Over the last years, web browsing has been steadily shifting from desktop computers to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. However, mobile browsers available today have mainly focused on performance rather than power consumption, although the battery life of a mobile device is one of the most important usability metrics. This is because many of these browsers have originated in the desktop domain and have been ported to the mobile domain. Such browsers have multiple power hungry components such as the rendering engine, and the JavaScript engine, and generate high workload without considering the capabilities and the power consumption characteristics of the underlying hardware platform. Also, the lack of coordination between a browser application and the power manager in the operating system (such as Android) results in poor power savings. In this paper, we propose a power manager that takes into account the internal state of a browser – that we refer to as a phase – and show with Google’s Chrome running on Android that up to 57.4% more energy can be saved over Android’s default power managers. We implemented and evaluated our technique on a heterogeneous multi-processing (HMP) ARM big.LITTLE platform such as the ones found in most modern smartphones.
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Web Browser Workload Characterization for Power Management on HMP Platforms
Nadja Peters
Samarjit Chakraborty
Sangyoung Park
Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE/ACM/IFIP International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS '12) (2016)
Preview abstract
The volume of mobile web browsing traffic has significantly
increased as well as the complexity of the mobile websites
mandating high-performance JavaScript engines such as Google’s
V8 to be used on mobile devices. Although there has been a
significant improvement in performance of JavaScript engine
on mobile phones in recent years, the power consumption re-
duction has not been addressed much. This paper presents
a case study for power management of JavaScript engine
V8 from Google in web browsers on a heterogeneous multi-
processing (HMP) platform. We analyze the detailed traces
of the thread workload generated by the web browser and
JavaScript engine, and discuss the power saving potentials
in relation to power management policies on Android. We
believe that this work will lead to development of practi-
cal power management techniques considering thread allo-
cation, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) and
power-gating.
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Memento Mori: Dynamic Allocation-site-based Optimizations
Michael Stanton
Ben L. Titzer
Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management, ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 105-117
Preview abstract
Languages that lack static typing are ubiquitous in the world of mobile and web applications. The rapid rise of larger applications like interactive web GUIs, games, and cryptography presents a new range of implementation challenges for modern virtual machines to close the performance gap between typed and untyped languages. While all languages can benefit from efficient automatic memory management, languages like JavaScript present extra thrill with innocent-looking but difficult features like dynamically-sized arrays, deletable properties, and prototypes. Optimizing such languages requires complex dynamic techniques with more radical object layout strategies such as dynamically evolving representations for arrays. This paper presents a general approach for gathering temporal allocation site feedback that tackles both the general problem of object lifetime estimation and improves optimization of these problematic language features. We introduce a new implementation technique where allocation mementos processed by the garbage collector and runtime system efficiently tie objects back to allocation sites in the program and dynamically estimate object lifetime, representation, and size to inform three optimizations: pretenuring, pretransitioning, and presizing. Unlike previous work on pretenuring, our system utilizes allocation mementos to achieve fully dynamic allocation-site-based pretenuring in a production system. We implement all of our techniques in V8, a high performance virtual machine for JavaScript, and demonstrate solid performance improvements across a range of benchmarks.
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Allocation Folding Based on Dominance
Michael Starzinger
Ben L. Titzer
Proceedings of the 2014 International Symposium on Memory Management, ACM, New York, NY, USA
Preview abstract
Memory management system performance is of increasing importance in today's managed languages.
Two lingering sources of overhead are the direct costs of memory allocations and write barriers.
This paper introduces allocation folding, an optimization technique where the virtual machine automatically folds multiple memory allocation operations in optimized code together into a single, larger allocation group.
An allocation group comprises multiple objects and requires just a single bounds check in a bump-pointer style allocation, rather than a check for each individual object.
More importantly, all objects allocated in a single allocation group are guaranteed to be contiguous after allocation and thus exist in the same generation, which makes it possible to statically remove write barriers for reference stores involving objects in the same allocation group.
Unlike object inlining, object fusing, and object colocation, allocation folding requires no special connectivity or ownership relation between the objects in an allocation group.
We present our analysis algorithm to determine when it is safe to fold allocations together and discuss our implementation in V8, an open-source, production JavaScript virtual machine.
We present performance results for the Octane and Kraken benchmark suites and show that allocation folding is a strong performance improvement, even in the presence of some heap fragmentation.
Additionally, we use four hand-selected benchmarks JPEGEncoder, NBody, Soft3D, and Textwriter where allocation folding has a large impact.
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