Execution characteristics of object oriented programs on the UltraSPARC-II

It is widely accepted that object-oriented design improves code reusability, facilitates code maintainability and enables higher levels of abstraction. Although software developers and the software engineering community have embraced object-oriented programming for these benefits, there have been wide concerns about the performance overhead associated with this programming paradigm on modern processors. We characterize the performance of several C and C++ benchmarks on an UltraSPARC-II processor. Various architectural data related to execution behavior of the benchmarks are collected using on-chip performance monitoring counters. Factors including CPI, instruction and data cache misses, processor stalls due to instruction cache misses and branch misprediction, from real execution of several programs are measured and presented. While previous research evaluates the behavioral differences between C and C++ programs based on profiling and simulation, we measure execution behavior. Results show that the programs in the C++ suite incur a higher CPI, higher i-cache misses, and higher branch mispredictions than the programs in the C suite. A strong correlation was observed between CPI and branch mispredictions for the C++ application programs.