Reducing Memory in Software-Based Thread-Level Speculation for JavaScript Virtual Machine Execution of Web Applications

Thread-Level Speculation has been used to take advantage of multicore processors in virtual execution environments for the sequential JavaScript scripting language. While the results are promising the memory overhead is high. Here we propose to reduce the memory usage by limiting the checkpoint depth based on an in-depth study of the memory and execution time effects. We also propose an adaptive heuristic to dynamically adjust the checkpoints. We evaluate this using 15 web applications on an 8-core computer. The results show that the memory overhead is reduced for Thread Level Speculation by over 90% as compared to storing all checkpoints. Further, the performance is often better than when storing all the checkpoints and at worst 4% slower.