Parallelizing symbol table/string table scan

[Coleen Phillimore]

On 11/11/2013 08:56 AM, Thomas Schatzl wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>    recently we (the gc team) noticed severe performance issues with
> symbol table and string table scan during remark.
>
> Basically, in G1 these pauses are the largest pauses on a reasonably
> tuned system. Also, in particular, symbol table scan alone takes 50% of
> total remark time. String table scan takes another 13%.

Why do you scan the symbol table during remark?   It doesn't contain any 
oops.

Now I'll read the rest...
Thanks,
Coleen

>
> At least symbol table scan is a pretty big issue.
>
> The simple approach to those is to parallelize these tasks of course,
> however I would like to query you for comments or suggestions :)
> (I am simply throwing some ideas on the wall, in the hope something
> sticks...)
>
> One idea that came up to optimize that further has been to not do string
> table or symbol table scrubbing after gc at all if no class unloading
> has been done, assuming that the amount of dead entries are zero anyway.
>
> This is (imo) true for the string table at least (because they are
> strong roots if not doing class unloading), but I am not so sure about
> the symbol table.
> You probably have more experience about the use of the symbol table, so
> any ideas what could cause symbol table entries to get stale other than
> class unloading, and if so, is this a big concern?
>
> Another option would be to do this symbol table scrubbing only after a
> certain amount of operations on the symbols, not sure if there is an
> indicator (that does not decrease perf for retrieving too much) for
> that.
>
> Another idea, again for the symbol table is to scrub it either
> incrementally (eg. depending on available time), or concurrently. I.e.
> some background task periodically waking up and scrubbing (parts of) the
> symbol table.
>
> Comments, suggestions?
>
> I also created a few RFEs for these issues, see
>
> Symbol table:
> https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8027455
> https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8027543
> String table:
> https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8027454
> https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8027476
>
> Thomas
>