GC、LOH和Performance相关

Performance

Now that we have a basic model for how things are working, let's consider some things that could go wrong that would make it slow. That will give us a good idea what sorts of things we should try to avoid to get the best performance out of the collector.

Too Many Allocations

This is really the most basic thing that can go wrong. Allocating new memory with the garbage collector is really quite fast. As you can see in Figure 2 above is all that needs to happen typically is for the allocation pointer to get moved to create space for your new object on the "allocated" side—it doesn't get much faster than that. However, sooner or later a garbage collect has to happen and, all things being equal, it's better for that to happen later than sooner. So you want to make sure when you're creating new objects that it's really necessary and appropriate to do so, even though creating just one is fast.

This may sound like obvious advice, but actually it's remarkably easy to forget that one little line of code you write could trigger a lot of allocations. For example, suppose you're writing a comparison function of some kind, and suppose that your objects have a keywords field and that you want your comparison to be case insensitive on the keywords in the order given. Now in this case you can't just compare the entire keywords string, because the first keyword might be very short. It would be tempting to use String.Split to break the keyword string into pieces and then compare each piece in order using the normal case-insensitive compare. Sounds great right?

Well, as it turns out doing it like that isn't such a good idea. You see, String.Split is going to create an array of strings, which means one new string object for every keyword originally in your keywords string plus one more object for the array. Yikes! If we're doing this in the context of a sort, that's a lot of comparisons and your two-line comparison function is now creating a very large number of temporary objects. Suddenly the garbage collector is going to be working very hard on your behalf, and even with the cleverest collection scheme there is just a lot of trash to clean up. Better to write a comparison function that doesn't require the allocations at all.

Too-Large Allocations

When working with a traditional allocator, such as malloc(), programmers often write code that makes as few calls to malloc() as possible because they know the cost of allocation is comparatively high. This translates into the practice of allocating in chunks, often speculatively allocating objects we might need, so that we can do fewer total allocations. The pre-allocated objects are then manually managed from some kind of pool, effectively creating a sort of high-speed custom allocator.

In the managed world this practice is much less compelling for several reasons:

First, the cost of doing an allocation is extremely low—there's no searching for free blocks as with traditional allocators; all that needs to happen is the boundary between the free and allocated areas needs to move. The low cost of allocation means that the most compelling reason to pool simply isn't present.

Second, if you do choose to pre-allocate you will of course be making more allocations than are required for your immediate needs, which could in turn force additional garbage collections that might otherwise have been unnecessary.

Finally, the garbage collector will be unable to reclaim space for objects that you are manually recycling, because from the global perspective all of those objects, including the ones that are not currently in use, are still live. You might find that a great deal of memory is wasted keeping ready-to-use but not in-use objects on hand.

This isn't to say that pre-allocating is always a bad idea. You might wish to do it to force certain objects to be initially allocated together, for instance, but you will likely find it is less compelling as a general strategy than it would be in unmanaged code.

Too Many Pointers

If you create a data structure that is a large mesh of pointers you'll have two problems. First, there will be a lot of object writes (see Figure 3 below) and, secondly, when it comes time to collect that data structure, you will make the garbage collector follow all those pointers and if necessary change them all as things move around. If your data structure is long-lived and won't change much, then the collector will only need to visit all those pointers when full collections happen (at the gen2 level). But if you create such a structure on a transitory basis, say as part of processing transactions, then you will pay the cost much more often.

Figure 3. Data structure heavy in pointers

Data structures that are heavy in pointers can have other problems as well, not related to garbage collection time. Again, as we discussed earlier, when objects are created they are allocated contiguously in the order of allocation. This is great if you are creating a large, possibly complex, data structure by, for instance, restoring information from a file. Even though you have disparate data types, all your objects will be close together in memory, which in turn will help the processor to have fast access to those objects. However, as time passes and your data structure is modified, new objects will likely need to be attached to the old objects. Those new objects will have been created much later and so will not be near the original objects in memory. Even when the garbage collector does compact your memory your objects will not be shuffled around in memory, they merely "slide" together to remove the wasted space. The resulting disorder might get so bad over time that you may be inclined to make a fresh copy of your whole data structure, all nicely packed, and let the old disorderly one be condemned by the collector in due course.

Too Many Roots

The garbage collector must of course give roots special treatment at collection time—they always have to be enumerated and duly considered in turn. The gen0 collection can be fast only to the extent that you don't give it a flood of roots to consider. If you were to create a deeply recursive function that has many object pointers among its local variables, the result can actually be quite costly. This cost is incurred not only in having to consider all those roots, but also in the extra-large number of gen0 objects that those roots might be keeping alive for not very long (discussed below).

Too Many Object Writes

Once again referring to our earlier discussion, remember that every time a managed program modified an object pointer the write barrier code is also triggered. This can be bad for two reasons:

First, the cost of the write barrier might be comparable to the cost of what you were trying to do in the first place. If you are, for instance, doing simple operations in some kind of enumerator class, you might find that you need to move some of your key pointers from the main collection into the enumerator at every step. This is actually something you might want to avoid, because you effectively double the cost of copying those pointers around due to the write barrier and you might have to do it one or more times per loop on the enumerator.

Second, triggering write barriers is doubly bad if you are in fact writing on older objects. As you modify your older objects you effectively create additional roots to check (discussed above) when the next garbage collection happens. If you modified enough of your old objects you would effectively negate the usual speed improvements associated with collecting only the youngest generation.

These two reasons are of course complemented by the usual reasons for not doing too many writes in any kind of program. All things being equal, it's better to touch less of your memory (read or write, in fact) so as to make more economical use of the processor's cache.

Too Many Almost-Long-Life Objects

Finally, perhaps the biggest pitfall of the generational garbage collector is the creation of many objects, which are neither exactly temporary nor are they exactly long-lived. These objects can cause a lot of trouble, because they will not be cleaned up by a gen0 collection (the cheapest), as they will still be necessary, and they might even survive a gen1 collection because they are still in use, but they soon die after that.

The trouble is, once an object has arrived at the gen2 level, only a full collection will get rid of it, and full collections are sufficiently costly that the garbage collector delays them as long as is reasonably possible. So the result of having many "almost-long-lived" objects is that your gen2 will tend to grow, potentially at an alarming rate; it might not get cleaned up nearly as fast as you would like, and when it does get cleaned up it will certainly be a lot more costly to do so than you might have wished.

To avoid these kinds of objects, your best lines of defense go like this:

  1. Allocate as few objects as possible, with due attention to the amount of temporary space you are using.
  2. Keep the longer-lived object sizes to a minimum.
  3. Keep as few object pointers on your stack as possible (those are roots).

If you do these things, your gen0 collections are more likely to be highly effective, and gen1 will not grow very fast. As a result, gen1 collections can be done less frequently and, when it becomes prudent to do a gen1 collection, your medium lifetime objects will already be dead and can be recovered, cheaply, at that time.

If things are going great then during steady-state operations your gen2 size will not be increasing at all!

原文：http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973837.aspx

关于GC和LOH的精彩推荐文章

posted on 2014-07-19 20:51  Mainz  阅读(728)  评论(0)  编辑  收藏  举报

导航