Architecture of the PEVM: A High-Performance Orthogonally Persistent JavaTM Virtual Machine

This paper describes the design and implementation of the PEVM, a new scalable, high-performance implementation of orthogonal persistence for the JavaTM platform (OPJ). The PEVM is based on the Sun Microsystems Laboratories Virtual Machine for Research (ResearchVM), which features an optimizing Just-In-Time compiler, exact generational garbage collection, and fast thread synchronization. It also uses a new, scalable persistent object store designed to manage more than 80GB of objects. The PEVM is approximately ten times faster than previous OPJ implementations and can run significantly larger programs. It is faster than or comparable in performance to several commercial persistence solutions for the Java platform. Despite the PEVM’s speed and scalability, its implementation is simpler than our previous OPJ implementation (e.g., just 43% of the VM source patches needed by our previous OPJ implementation). Its speed and simplicity are largely due to our pointer swizzling strategy, the ResearchVM’s exact memory management, and a few simple but effective mechanisms. For example, we implement some key data structures in the JavaTM programming language since this automatically makes them persistent. email address: [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] © 2000 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. The SML Technical Report Series is published by Sun Microsystems Laboratories, of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Printed in U.S.A. Unlimited copying without fee is permitted provided that the copies are not made nor distributed for direct commercial advantage, and credit to the source is given. Otherwise, no part of this work covered by copyright hereon may be reproduced in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or storage in an information retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. TRADEMARKS Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, Java, J2EE, HotSpot, JVM, and PJama are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. For information regarding the SML Technical Report Series, contact Jeanie Treichel, Editor-in-Chief . The entire technical report collection is available online at http://www.sun.com/research. Architecture of the PEVM: A High-Performance Orthogonally Persistent Java Virtual Machine Brian Lewis, Bernd Mathiske, Neal Gafter Sun Microsystems, Inc. 901 San Antonio Road Palo Alto, CA 94303-4900