RFR (XS): 8165313: Inserting freed regions during Free Collection Set serial phase takes very long on huge heaps

[Mikael Gerdin]

Hi Thomas,

On 2016-09-08 13:24, Thomas Schatzl wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>   can I have a review for this tiny change that re-adds some changes
> that were ommitted to JDK-8034842 at the last minute?
>
> However, some customers verified JDK-8034842 only with the original
> patch, so they would experience a huge regression to their initial
> measurements without this change.
>
> The problem is the sorted insertion of the collection set regions into
> the free list during the "Free Collection Set phase". This insertion
> typically requires a complete scan of the existing list, unless we
> insert in ascending order (there is some special case for this in our
> free list implementation).
>
> Now, if you have a very large young gen in the range of 10k's of
> regions (like TB young gen), this can take up to 1.5s alone.
>
> The fix is to exploit the optimization we have in our free list
> implementation, and guarantee that we always add to the list in the
> ascending order by pre-sorting the collection set regions.
>
> Measurements of sorting indicates like 1ms taken for a 10 thousands of
> integers.
>
> With this change, the length of this phase goes down to <50ms again,
> which is acceptable for now as other parts of the GC now take much
> longer than that. There is a follow-up CR JDK-8165443 to look into
> further optimizations.
>
> CR:
> https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8165313
> Webrev:
> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~tschatzl/8165313/webrev/

If you want to avoid casting to and from void* you can use 
utilities/quickSort.hpp

If you don't want that then please clean up the casts in 
compare_region_idx, it feels very weird to start out with a const void*, 
then cast away const and turn it into a uint* only to then dereference 
the uint* and store it in a const uint.

/Mikael

> Testing:
> jprt, local perf testing
>
> Thanks,
>   Thomas
>