As far as I know the JVM uses escape analysis for some performance optimisations like lock coarsening and lock elision. I'm interested if there is a possibility for the JVM to decide that any particular object can be allocated on stack using escape analysis.
Some resources make me think that I am right. Is there JVMs that actually do it?
With this version of java -XX:+DoEscapeAnalysis results in far less gc activity and 14x faster execution.
$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_14"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_14-b08)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 14.0-b16, mixed mode, sharing)
$ uname -a
Linux xxx 2.6.18-4-686 #1 SMP Mon Mar 26 17:17:36 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux
Without escape analysis,
$ java -server -verbose:gc EscapeAnalysis|cat -n
1 start
2 [GC 896K->102K(5056K), 0.0053480 secs]
3 [GC 998K->102K(5056K), 0.0012930 secs]
4 [GC 998K->102K(5056K), 0.0006930 secs]
--snip--
174 [GC 998K->102K(5056K), 0.0001960 secs]
175 [GC 998K->102K(5056K), 0.0002150 secs]
176 10000000
With escape analysis,
$ java -server -verbose:gc -XX:+DoEscapeAnalysis EscapeAnalysis
start
[GC 896K->102K(5056K), 0.0055600 secs]
10000000
The execution time reduces significantly with escape analysis. For this the loop was changed to 10e9 iterations,
public static void main(String [] args){
System.out.println("start");
for(int i = 0; i < 1000*1000*1000; ++i){
Foo foo = new Foo();
}
System.out.println(Foo.counter);
}
Without escape analysis,
$ time java -server EscapeAnalysis
start
1000000000
real 0m27.386s
user 0m24.950s
sys 0m1.076s
With escape analysis,
$ time java -server -XX:+DoEscapeAnalysis EscapeAnalysis
start
1000000000
real 0m2.018s
user 0m2.004s
sys 0m0.012s
So with escape analysis the example ran about 14x faster than the non-escape analysis run.