RFR (S): 8075288: Remove dictionary NULL check on common path of BlockFreeList methods

[Jon Masamitsu]

On 4/29/2015 4:27 PM, Kim Barrett wrote:
> On Apr 29, 2015, at 5:46 PM, Jungwoo Ha <jwha at google.com> wrote:
>> Oops. I meant to copy BUG-8079091
>> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jwha/8079091/webrev.00/
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 2:40 PM, Jungwoo Ha <jwha at google.com> wrote:
>> BUG: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8079091
>> Webrev: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jwha/8075288/webrev.00/
>>
>> Can someone sponsor this change?
>> I've seen ~3% speed up on DaCapo benchmarks. (results attached on the bug page.)
>> Regardless of the speed up, I think the changes are straight-forward improvement.
>>
>> --
>> Jungwoo Ha
> I'm not sure of this, but I think metaspace belongs to runtime rather
> than gc. If so, this should go through the hs-rt repository and have
> runtime folks involved in the review.

Logically metaspace code could be said to belong in runtime but I wrote much
of it so changes can come through gc as far as I'm concerned.

>
>> I've seen ~3% speed up on DaCapo benchmarks. (results attached on the bug page.)
> Wow!
>
> Hm.  There are a couple of benchmarks that are a little bit slower.  I
> don't know enough about that suite of benchmarks to know how important
> that might be.
>
> Since the dictionary is always being created at construction time, the
> null check in ~BlockFreelist is no longer needed either.
>
> It seems like a further improvement might be obtained by making the
> dictionary a direct member subobject of BlockFreelist, rather than
> allocating it as a separate object, thereby eliminating an
> indirection.
>
> Pre-existing: Why is there a cast in SpaceManager::block_freelists()?
>
> Pre-existing: I found the private BlockFreelist::dictionary() member
> function distracting rather than helpful, and would have preferred
> just using the private data member directly. But maybe that's just me.
> If _dictionary is changed to a subobject rather than a pointer, I'd
> suggest changing a bunch of "dictionary()->XXX" to "_dictionary.XXX".

That style is my doing and my preference.    There remains differing 
opinions in the
group on the style and some consider the accessors wasted effort but I 
find them
useful often enough to prefer them.

Jon




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