Abstract

. A profiler was constructed to monitor memory allocations in IBM Smalltalk program and report them to the user through a graphical display. Allocation events were processed through a pipeline that filtered them to allow the user to zero in on allocations from any class or process. The initial implementation slowed the running of monitored programs by two orders of magnitude. Four performance enhancements resulted in a speed improvement of approximately eight times for the usual situation in which the user is monitoring performance in specific classes. Work is underway to improve the performance further. 1. Introduction Performance has always been a concern with object-oriented software. Much attention has been focused on garbage collection [CM 96, DTM 95, Zorn 93, Ungar 87] and method dispatch [AGS 94, Driesen 93, HC 92, Rose 88], but little work has been done on other aspects of performance. We believe that important performance gains can be achieved by reducing the amount of memory...

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