Adaptable pointer swizzling strategies in object bases: design, realization, and quantitative analysis

In this article, different techniques for “pointer swizzling” are classified and evaluated for optimizing the access to main-memory resident persistent objects. To speed up the access along inter-object references, the persistent pointers in the form of unique object identifiers (OIDs) are transformed (swizzled) into main-memory pointers (addresses). Pointer swizzling techniques can be divided into two classes: (1) those that allow replacement of swizzled objects from the buffer before the end of an application program, and (2) those that rule out the displacement of swizzled objects. The first class (i.e., techniques that take “precautions” for the replacement of swizzled objects) has not yet been thoroughly investigated. Four different pointer swizzling techniques allowing object replacement are investigated and compared with the performance of an object manager employing no pointer swizzling. The extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation—only part of which could be presented in this article—demonstrate that there is noone superior pointer swizzling strategy forall application profiles. Therefore, an adaptable object base run-time system is devised that employs the full range of pointer swizzling strategies, depending on the application profile characteristics that are determined by, for example, monitoring in combination with sampling, user specifications, and/or program analysis.