Performance of Arrays.fill for primitives and references

[Marko Topolnik]

I have encountered a large discrepancy in the performance of
Arrays.fill(int[], int) vs. Arrays.fill(Object[], Object). From jmh:

Benchmark              Mode   Samples         Mean   Mean error    Units
fillIntArray           avgt        10      802.393       19.323    ns/op
fillReferenceArray     avgt        10     5323.516      105.982    ns/op

The array size is 8192, which means that filling an int array works at
above 10 slots/nanosecond (2.66 GHZ Intel Core i7)---this sound like
fantastic performance.

My question is, what is stopping HotSpot from applying the same
optimization to a reference array?

One guess was the maintenance of the card table, but I couldn't get enough
information to confirm that. A naive view of optimization opportunities
seems to indicate that the card table could be updated wholesale either
before or after writing out the array.

Printing assembly code, all I can see in the fill(Object[],Object) case is
the explicit loop involving the write barrier on each slot write:

lea eax, [edx+ebx*4+0x10]
mov [eax], edx
shr eax, 9
mov [edi+eax], ah

whereas for fill(int[],int) I see an opaque

mov edx, 0x0000000011145ca0
call edx

for the whole filling operation.


I was testing on 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.0-b56, mixed mode) with default
settings.

For reference, this is the code I have used:

@OutputTimeUnit(TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS)
@BenchmarkMode(Mode.AverageTime)
@Warmup(iterations = 5, time = 1)
@Measurement(iterations = 10, time = 2)
@State(Scope.Thread)
@Threads(1)
@Fork(1)
public class Writing
{
  static final int TARGET_SIZE = 1<<13;

  static final int[] intArray = new int[TARGET_SIZE];
  static final Object[] referenceArray = new Object[TARGET_SIZE];

  int intVal = 1;
  @GenerateMicroBenchmark
  public void fillIntArray() {
    Arrays.fill(intArray, intVal++);
  }

  @GenerateMicroBenchmark
  public void fillReferenceArray() {
    Arrays.fill(referenceArray, new Object());
  }
}
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/hotspot-compiler-dev/attachments/20140204/96f1e6ba/attachment.html