Paging Performance in the MT Evaluator Virtual Machine

The performance of functional languages is closely related to the manner in which they utilize memory and it is com-monly believed that functional languages are slow due to their poor interaction with memory. To make functional languages faster research efforts have focused on parallelism, on memory allocation and performance, and on compiler technology. Each of these lines of research has advanced considerably, but have rarely been combined into one com-prehensive approach. The MT system is being developed as a test bed for novel implementation techniques to improve memory performance by utilizing parallelism and modern compiler technology to manage a distributed memory sys-tem to support a program evaluator. In this paper, we first briefly describe the MT evaluator virtual machine and its new implementation in C++. We then present performance measurements of the paging behavior of MT’s heap, stack, and code space using three benchmarks that represent typ-ical programs written using a functional language. The re-sults confirm previous findings that suggest FIFO ought to be used over LRU as the page replacement policy for MT’s heap while LRU ought to be used for MT’s stack. We also present the first empirical measurements taken on the paging behavior of MT’s code space. These measurements suggest that LRU performs better than FIFO, but that FIFO is a competitive page replacement policy for MT’s code space. 1