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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-1320?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=14499898#comment-14499898
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Maximilian Michels commented on FLINK-1320:
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Absolutely, let's keep it open. We didn't make any decisions concerning the
project or the issue. [~nrai] merely expressed his interest for this issue and
since I was working on it in the past, I told him that he could assign this
issue to him.
> Add an off-heap variant of the managed memory
> ---------------------------------------------
>
> Key: FLINK-1320
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-1320
> Project: Flink
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Components: Local Runtime
> Reporter: Stephan Ewen
> Assignee: niraj rai
> Priority: Minor
>
> For (nearly) all memory that Flink accumulates (in the form of sort buffers,
> hash tables, caching), we use a special way of representing data serialized
> across a set of memory pages. The big work lies in the way the algorithms are
> implemented to operate on pages, rather than on objects.
> The core class for the memory is the {{MemorySegment}}, which has all methods
> to set and get primitives values efficiently. It is a somewhat simpler (and
> faster) variant of a HeapByteBuffer.
> As such, it should be straightforward to create a version where the memory
> segment is not backed by a heap byte[], but by memory allocated outside the
> JVM, in a similar way as the NIO DirectByteBuffers, or the Netty direct
> buffers do it.
> This may have multiple advantages:
> - We reduce the size of the JVM heap (garbage collected) and the number and
> size of long living alive objects. For large JVM sizes, this may improve
> performance quite a bit. Utilmately, we would in many cases reduce JVM size
> to 1/3 to 1/2 and keep the remaining memory outside the JVM.
> - We save copies when we move memory pages to disk (spilling) or through
> the network (shuffling / broadcasting / forward piping)
> The changes required to implement this are
> - Add a {{UnmanagedMemorySegment}} that only stores the memory adress as a
> long, and the segment size. It is initialized from a DirectByteBuffer.
> - Allow the MemoryManager to allocate these MemorySegments, instead of the
> current ones.
> - Make sure that the startup script pick up the mode and configure the heap
> size and the max direct memory properly.
> Since the MemorySegment is probably the most performance critical class in
> Flink, we must take care that we do this right. The following are critical
> considerations:
> - If we want both solutions (heap and off-heap) to exist side-by-side
> (configurable), we must make the base MemorySegment abstract and implement
> two versions (heap and off-heap).
> - To get the best performance, we need to make sure that only one class
> gets loaded (or at least ever used), to ensure optimal JIT de-virtualization
> and inlining.
> - We should carefully measure the performance of both variants. From
> previous micro benchmarks, I remember that individual byte accesses in
> DirectByteBuffers (off-heap) were slightly slower than on-heap, any larger
> accesses were equally good or slightly better.
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