Efficient Code Caching to Improve Performance and Energy Consumption for Java Applications

Java applications rely on Just-In-Time (JIT) compilers or adaptive compilers to generate and optimize binary code at runtime to boost performance. In conventional Java Virtual Machines (JVM), however, the binary code is typically writ-ten into the data cache, and then is loaded into the instruc-tion cache through the shared L2 cache or memory, which is not efficient in terms of both time and energy. In this paper, we study three hardware-based code caching strate-gies to write and read the dynamically generated code faster and more energy-efficiently. Our experimental results indi-cate that writing code directly into the instruction cache can improve the performance of a variety of Java applications by 9.6 % on average, and up to 42.9%. Also, the overall energy dissipation of these Java programs can be reduced by 6 % on average