Initial preview: JEP-149 Reduced Class instance size

[Brian Goetz]

Reducing the number of SoftReferences in ReflectionHelper also seems an 
attractive target for memory reduction.  Rather than eight soft 
references (eight extra objects), maintaining a SoftRef to the entire 
RH, or at least to the part of the RH that is currently SR'ed if the two 
non-SR'ed fields can't be recomputed, would save you a whole pile of 
objects per class (and might also reduce pressure on GC, having 8x fewer 
SRs to process.)

Finally, you may be able save an extra field per Class by storing the 
ReflectionHelper in a ClassValue on Java SE 8, rather than a field.

On 4/4/2012 10:50 PM, David Holmes wrote:
> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~dholmes/JEP-149/webrev/
>
> This is an early look at a proposed change to reduce the instance size
> of Java Class objects in the common case that reflection is not used.
>
> In SE 7 a java.lang.Class instance is 104 bytes on 32-bit systems. It
> consists of the 8-byte object header, 19 declared fields and 5 injected
> fields (fields added by the VM as-if they were declared in
> java.lang.Class but which do not appear in the Java source code). There
> are 10 reference fields associated with reflection caching that can be
> moved to a helper object with no impact on the VM or serialization
> protocols. Adding back a reference for the helper, that saves 9
> references. Notionally this is 36 bytes on 32-bit but due to 8-byte
> alignment it only saves 32 bytes. That gives a size of 72 bytes - a
> reduction of 30%. This initial modification has been prototyped for
> initial performance measurements.
>
> Note that if reflection is used then the amount of memory used by the
> Class will increase by 8-bytes - that being the additional object header
> of the ReflectionHelper instance. So the net gain depends on the ratio
> of reflection using classes to non-reflection-using classes in an
> application.
>
> Please note that I've put this out just before I disappear on vacation
> for 10 days, so if you don't see any responses from me that is why. :)
>
> Thanks,
> David Holmes