RFR: 8347337: ZGC: String dedups short-lived strings [v3]

[Stefan Karlsson]

On Wed, 23 Apr 2025 13:45:32 GMT, Stefan Karlsson <stefank at openjdk.org> wrote:

>> When -XX:+UseStringDeduplication is turned on, ZGC requests that every single String it encounters is deduplicated. The Strings of these requests are saved in weak handles, and then processed by a separate thread. One problematic part with this is that ZGC treats these handles as strong roots for young collections. So, even if the Strings are short-lived they will be artificially kept alive until they get promoted up to the old generation.
>> 
>> This creates an extreme amount of Strings and weak handles to be processed by the old collection, which can result in long major collections and allocation stalls.
>> 
>> Other GCs have a filter to check for how old the Strings are before they get deduplicated.
>> 
>> The proposed fix is to move the string deduplication requests to when the Strings are promoted to the old generation.
>> 
>> Testing:
>> 
>> * I've tested this with a small micro that showed how ZGC got extremely long major collections with string deduplication turned on.
>> 
>> * SPECjbb2015 with a JVMTI agent that induces load and adds deduplicatable strings.
>> 
>> * Tier1-7
>> 
>> Note: I'm currently not aware of any non-artificial workload where string deduplication is an important optimization when running with Generational ZGC. If anyone knows of a workload that greatly benefits from it *AND* uses ZGC as a low-latency collector, then that would be highly interesting to look at.
>> 
>> Note 2: the branch contains two changesets. In the first changeset I added a flag to be able to test and compare the old implementation with the new implementation. For the final PR I've removed that flag and the associated code as a second changeset. If we really want we could keep that flag, but given how poorly that implementation worked for Generational ZGC, I think we should just go with this new implementation.
>
> Stefan Karlsson has updated the pull request with a new target base due to a merge or a rebase. The pull request now contains five commits:
> 
>  - Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/master' into 8347337_string_dedup_at_promotion
>  - Make ZPageAge ZForwarding member fileds constant
>  - Review comments
>  - Remove string dedup from marking
>  - 8347337: ZGC: String dedups short-lived strings

Thanks for the reviews!

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/23965#issuecomment-2826620564