Cache Behaviour of Lazy Functional Programs

. To deepen our quantitative understanding of the performance of lazy evaluation, we have studied the cache behaviour of a benchmark of functional programs. The compiler, based on the G-machine style of graph reduction, has been modified to insert monitoring code into the executable that records instruction and data references at run time. The resulting address trace is used to drive a cache simulator that computes statistics like miss rates and traffic ratios. A number of experiments with different cache parameters (size, associativity, etc.) shows that the benchmark programs have a strong spatial locality in their memory references. This is caused by the heap allocation strategy that allocates nodes by advancing a pointer through the heap, generating new addresses. Therefore the initialisation of new heap nodes results in cache misses, which dominate performance. Comparisons with results of other functional language implementations confirm this behaviour 1 Introduction Recently, com..