Object caching for performance in object-oriented systems

Abstract

Object-oriented systems exhibit a very high rate of object creation, but most objects are short-lived. As a result, memory-management overhead is significant. An application-specific coprocessor architecture to speed up object creation and memory reclamation in object-oriented systems is described. The architecture supports a bit-vector approach to dynamic storage allocation and liberation. Novel created objects reside in a cache that is reference counted. Most objects are expected to die before they age out of the cache, drastically reducing the number of references to main memory. Many existing computer architectures would require only minor compiler modification to incorporate and benefit from this coprocessor.<>