RFR: 8361099: Shenandoah: Improve heap lock contention by using CAS for memory allocation [v57]
Xiaolong Peng
xpeng at openjdk.org
Fri Jan 23 07:30:12 UTC 2026
> Shenandoah always allocates memory with heap lock, we have observed heavy heap lock contention on memory allocation path in performance analysis of some service in which we tried to adopt Shenandoah. This change is to propose an optimization for the code path of memory allocation to improve heap lock contention, along with the optimization, a better OOD is also done to Shenandoah memory allocation to reuse the majority of the code:
>
> * ShenandoahAllocator: base class of the allocators, most of the allocation code is in this class.
> * ShenandoahMutatorAllocator: allocator for mutator, inherit from ShenandoahAllocator, only override methods `alloc_start_index`, `verify`, `_alloc_region_count` and `_yield_to_safepoint` to customize the allocator for mutator.
> * ShenandoahCollectorAllocator: allocator for collector allocation in Collector partition, similar to ShenandoahMutatorAllocator, only few lines of code to customize the allocator for Collector.
> * ShenandoahOldCollectorAllocator: allocator for mutator collector allocation in OldCollector partition, it doesn't inherit the logic from ShenandoahAllocator for now, the `allocate` method has been overridden to delegate to `FreeSet::allocate_for_collector` due to the special allocation considerations for `plab` in old gen. We will rewrite this part later and move the code out of `FreeSet::allocate_for_collector`
>
> I'm not expecting significant performance impact for most of the cases since in most case the contention on heap lock it not high enough to cause performance issue, but in some cases it may improve the latency/performance:
>
> 1. Dacapo lusearch test on EC2 host with 96 CPU cores, p90 is improved from 500+us to less than 150us, p99 from 1000+us to ~200us.
>
> java -XX:-TieredCompilation -XX:+AlwaysPreTouch -Xms31G -Xmx31G -XX:+UseShenandoahGC -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+UnlockDiagnosticVMOptions -XX:-ShenandoahUncommit -XX:ShenandoahGCMode=generational -XX:+UseTLAB -jar ~/tools/dacapo/dacapo-23.11-MR2-chopin.jar -n 10 lusearch | grep "metered full smoothing"
>
>
> Openjdk TIP:
>
> ===== DaCapo tail latency, metered full smoothing: 50% 241098 usec, 90% 402356 usec, 99% 411065 usec, 99.9% 411763 usec, 99.99% 415531 usec, max 428584 usec, measured over 524288 events =====
> ===== DaCapo tail latency, metered full smoothing: 50% 902 usec, 90% 3713 usec, 99% 5898 usec, 99.9% 6488 usec, 99.99% 7081 usec, max 8048 usec, measured over 524288 events =====
> ===== DaCapo tail latency, metered full smoothing: 50% 2...
Xiaolong Peng has updated the pull request with a new target base due to a merge or a rebase. The pull request now contains 325 commits:
- Fix crash after merging from tip(due to the new free-set rebuild calls)
- Fix build error after merging tip
- Merge branch 'master' into cas-alloc-1
- FullGC should not update accounting when release alloc regions
- Not update accounting if no region is unretired to partition
- Invoke assert_bounds after updating accounting from ShenandoahAllocator
- Remove use AtomicAccess for _top if permits
- Missed place calling function is_active_alloc_region
- Rename function is_active_alloc_region to is_atomic_alloc_region
- Remove _active_alloc_region flag and directly use field _atomic_top to determine atomic alloc region
- ... and 315 more: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/compare/0f087a7f...9ba19e42
-------------
Changes: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/26171/files
Webrev: https://webrevs.openjdk.org/?repo=jdk&pr=26171&range=56
Stats: 1832 lines in 29 files changed: 1461 ins; 237 del; 134 mod
Patch: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/26171.diff
Fetch: git fetch https://git.openjdk.org/jdk.git pull/26171/head:pull/26171
PR: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/26171
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