MTM2: Scalable Memory Management for Multi-Tasking Managed Runtime Environments

Multi-tasking, Managed Runtime Environments (MREs) for modern type-safe, object-oriented programming languages enable isolated, concurrent execution of multiple applications within a single operating system process. Multi-tasking MREs can potentially extract high-performance on modern desktop and hand-held systems through aggressive sharing of classes and compiled code, and by exploiting high-level dynamic program information for optimization across program executions. In this paper, the authors investigate the performance of a state-of-the-art multi-taking MRE for concurrent program execution and find that due to limited support for multi-tasking and performance isolation in the memory management subsystem, multi-tasking performs poorly compared to a production-quality, single-tasking MRE.