The Java Specialists' Newsletter
Issue 1792009-12-30 Category: Performance Java version: 5+

A hearty welcome to the 179th edition of The Java(tm) Specialists' Newsletter, sent to you from the beautiful warm and sunny island of Crete. Whilst my wife and oldest daughter are spending a week shivering in England, I'm left playing mom and dad back in Crete with our other two. Rather challenging finding time to research the topic for this month amongst cooking and various domestic tasks. If I did this job permanently I'd lose 20 pounds in the first month.

So, before we end 2009, here is one more little newsletter for all the diehard Java programmers who are still sitting behind their desks despite the many holidays.

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Escape Analysis

Escape analysis has been hailed as a solution to GC problems for the last few years. Here are some articles written that explain what it is and why it can help us.

It is easy to be confused by the results of the escape analysis flag since it does two things. It can omit constructing objects that do not escape, even keeping them in CPU registers. However, it also avoids synchronization on non-escaping objects. This can skew the results of microbenchmarks to make it seem that escape analysis is better than it really is.

One way to tell the difference is to log the GC output. If a benchmark runs faster with escape analysis turned on and the GC output (-Xloggc:file.gc) is the same, it is most likely the result of lock eliding.

Writing a benchmark to specifically test escape analysis is rather difficult. After more than a dozen dead ends, I came up with this one whilst taking my 3 year old for a walk around the countryside this morning. Escape analysis seems to give us the best performance gains with poorly written code, such as when we create lots of unnecessary objects. For example, here is a Calculator, that adds two ints together. Even though the method add() could be static, we wrote it as non-static to demonstrate the power of escape analysis.

public class Calculator {
  public int add(int i0, int i1) {
    return i0 + i1;
  }
}
  

In our poorly written CalculatorTest, we construct a new Calculator object every time we call the add method. You would hopefully agree that this is a harebrained way of coding Java. We use the return value of the calculation to ensure that the entire methods are not optimized away.

public class CalculatorTest {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    long time = System.currentTimeMillis();
    long grandTotal = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++) {
      grandTotal += test();
    }
    time = System.currentTimeMillis() - time;
    System.out.println("time = " + time + "ms");
    System.out.println("grandTotal = " + grandTotal);
  }

  private static long test() {
    long total = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {
      Calculator calc = new Calculator();
      total += calc.add(i, i/2);
    }
    return total;
  }
}
  

I ran this with an old Java 1.6.0_03 32-bit server JVM on my Mac (Soylatte) and the latest 1.6.0_17 64-bit server JVM. Escape analysis has only been officially available since 1.6.0_14, so I could not use it for Soylatte.

EA on   EA off   Old Java
2.2s    8.6s     7.0s
  

With escape analysis turned off, we constructed 15 GB of heap objects. Even though GC was only 2% of CPU, we did create 1.3 GB per second. We call this object churn. The 32-bit Soylatte JVM constructed 7.6 GB of objects. Since the objects are half the size of the 64-bit objects, 8 bytes as opposed to 16 bytes, these values make sense. I tried to compress the OOPS using the new -XX:+UseCompressedOops flag, but that did not seem to make much difference. The objects are still each 16 bytes, according to the GC logs.

As I said before, escape analysis helps us to improve performance of poorly written code. Instead of taking 8.6 seconds, we only take 2.2 seconds. However, if we change our code to reuse the Calculator object, or even make the add method static, then the test executes in under a second.

An interesting application of escape analysis is with varargs. In one of my many experiments, I found that array objects only benefit from escape analysis when the size is 64 or less. So if you write really really bad code with more than 64 arguments for a varargs call, then your program will slow down to a crawl. Here is some sample code:

public class VarArgsTest {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    long time = System.currentTimeMillis();
    long grandTotal = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++) {
      grandTotal += test();
    }
    time = System.currentTimeMillis() - time;
    System.out.println("time = " + time + "ms");
    System.out.println("grandTotal = " + grandTotal);
  }

  private static long test() {
    long total = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {
      total += test(
          i, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
          i, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
          i, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
          i, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
          i, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
          i, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
          i, 1, 2, 3
      );
    }
    return total;
  }

  public static int test(int... args) {
    return args[0] + args.length;
  }
}
  

When we run this with 64 parameters, we get the following results, where escape analysis just made our code 110x faster:

EA on   EA off   Old Java
1.2s    140s     120s
  

Since escape analysis only seems to work with arrays of length 64 or less, if we add a single parameter to the method call above, it slows down to a crawl:

EA on   EA off   Old Java
150s    150s     120s
  

We will probably never write such bad code, taking 65 parameters. However, knowing that there is special treatment for arrays of length 64 or less means that we need to take that into account when writing our benchmarks. For example, adding three Strings together using a StringBuilder or StringBuffer is only sensible if the total length can sometimes exceed 64 characters.

Let's apply the knowledge of vararg improvements into a better Calculator, now called CalculatorVarArgs:

public class CalculatorVarArgs {
  public int add(int... is) {
    if (is.length == 0) throw new IllegalArgumentException();
    if (is.length == 1) return is[0];
    if (is.length == 2) return is[0] + is[1];
    if (is.length == 3) return is[0] + is[1] + is[2];
    if (is.length == 4) return is[0] + is[1] + is[2] + is[3];
    int total = 0;
    for (int i : is) {
      total += i;
    }
    return total;
  }
}
  

Note the rather convoluted syntax for dealing with cases where the length of the array is less than 5. I would've thought that the loops would be unrolled automatically. It does seem to make a rather large performance difference, so look at this if a vararg method is your bottleneck.

With a small test, we see that the varargs also does not create objects on the Java Heap as long as the array is small enough:

public class CalculatorVarargTest {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    long time = System.currentTimeMillis();
    long grandTotal = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++) {
      grandTotal += test();
    }
    time = System.currentTimeMillis() - time;
    System.out.println("time = " + time + "ms");
    System.out.println("grandTotal = " + grandTotal);
  }

  private static long test() {
    long total = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {
      CalculatorVarArgs calc = new CalculatorVarArgs();
      total += calc.add(i, i/2);
    }
    return total;
  }
}
  

As you can see in our results, the varargs makes a difference when escape analysis is turned off, but otherwise not.

EA on   EA off   Old Java
2.2s    23s      18s
  

Java SciMark 2.0

It's quite interesting running the scimark benchmark using the various Escape Analysis settings. The biggest difference is with the Monte Carlo calculation. On my laptop, it runs in 410 with EA on and 300 with EA off. However, there are hardly any objects collected, so my suspicion is that performance improvement is coming from synchronization eliding.

Real-Life Escape Analysis Improvements

Just because some microbenchmarks run 110x faster, does not mean that our real application code is going to perform better, unless we are really bad programmers.

On the other hand, perhaps now with escape analysis and lock eliding in place, we have lowered the bar of what a good programmer should be able to figure out? For example, as Jeroen Borges correctly points out in his article, StringBuilder is now obsolete, after just one Java version. The benefit we had with StringBuilder was as an unsynchronized version of StringBuffer. However, with lock eliding we should not need to concern ourselves with this anymore. Even Vector might become fashionable again.

Non-Escaping Object Storage

The Java release notes indicate that non-escaping objects are treated as local variables, maybe even being stored in machine registers. However, I have not managed to write a benchmark that demonstates this. We would expect that if we use escape analysis that we would run out of stack space more quickly. However, that does not seem to be the case, even if we have larger objects, such as int[64]. It would be interesting to see a benchmark that shows how or where we can run out of resources differently with escape analysis enabled. A job for another day ...

My son asked me what type of weather we can expect tomorrow in Crete, considering that winter has officially started. Looks like 26 Celsius and sunny. Just thought you'd like to know that information :-)))

Kind regards

Heinz

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