Compiler Technology for Scalable Servers

本研究探讨了用于提高Internet服务器程序性能和可扩展性的编译器技术。服务器具有一组不同于编译器过去关注的计算的特征。服务器通常使用许多短寿命线程来管理来自多个客户机的I/O绑定连接，而不是使用少量的长寿命线程来执行计算绑定计算。这些新特性增加了系统以前不太相关的方面，如线程创建开销和线程堆栈开销。它们还为编译器提供了改进内存管理的机会。该研究将通过自动将多线程代码转换为事件驱动形式来减少线程开销。事件驱动的代码形式包含一个事件循环，该循环反复阻塞，等待来自任何当前连接的下一个事件。然后调用执行适当操作的处理程序，然后返回到事件循环。这种转换将消除线程创建和管理开销。编译器将通过分析程序来识别生命周期与单个线程绑定的对象，然后对这些对象使用专门的内存管理算法，从而减少内存管理开销。

This research investigates compiler techniques for improving theperformance and scalability of Internet server programs. Servers havea different set of characteristics from the computations that compilerwriters have focused on in the past. Instead of executing acompute-bound computation with a modest number of long-lived threads,servers typically use many short-lived threads to manage I/O boundconnections from multiple clients. These new characteristics place apremium on previously less relevant aspects of the system such as thethread creation overhead and thread stack overhead. They also provideopportunities that the compiler can exploit to improve the memorymanagement. The research will attack thread overhead by automaticallytransforming multithreaded code to event-driven form. Code inevent-driven form contains an event loop that repeatedly blockswaiting for the next event from any of the current connections. Itthen invokes a handler that executes the appropriate action, thenreturns to the event loop. This transformation will eliminate threadcreation and management overhead. The compiler will attack memorymanagement overhead by analyzing the program to identify objects whoselifetimes are tied to individual threads, then using specializedmemory management algorithms for these objects.