GC-Wise: A Self-adaptive approach for memory-performance efficiency in Java VMs

Abstract

Abstract High-level language runtimes are ubiquitous in every cloud deployment. From the geo-distributed heavy resources cloud provider to the new Fog and Edge deployment paradigms, all rely on these runtimes for portability, isolation and resource management. Across these clouds, an efficient resource management of several managed runtimes involves limiting the heap size of some VMs so that extra memory can be assigned to higher priority workloads. The challenges in this approach rely on the potential scale of systems and the need to make decisions in an application-driven way, because performance degradation can be severe, and therefore it should be minimized. Also, each tenant tends to repeat the execution of applications with similar memory-usage patterns, giving opportunity to reuse parameters known to work well for a given workload. This paper presents GC-Wise, a system to determine, at run-time, the best values for critical heap management parameters of the OpenJDK JVM, aiming to maximize memory-performance efficiency. GC-Wise comprises two main phases: 1) a training phase where it collects, with different heap resizing policies, representative execution metrics during the lifespan of a workload; and 2) an execution phase where an oracle matches the execution parameters of new workloads against those of already seen workloads, and enforces the best heap resizing policy. Distinctly from other works, the oracle can also decide upon unknown workloads. Using representative applications and different hardware setting (a resourceful server and a fog-like device), we show that our approach can lead to significant memory savings with low-impact on the throughput of applications. Furthermore, we show that we can predict with high accuracy the best heap resizing configuration in a relatively short period of time.