Compiler Technology for Scalable Servers

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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.