English

Tidying Up the Address Space

Operating Systems 2025-10-23 v1 Performance Programming Languages

Abstract

Memory tiering in datacenters does not achieve its full potential due to hotness fragmentation -- the intermingling of hot and cold objects within memory pages. This fragmentation prevents page-based reclamation systems from distinguishing truly hot pages from pages containing mostly cold objects, fundamentally limiting memory efficiency despite highly skewed accesses. We introduce address-space engineering: dynamically reorganizing application virtual address spaces to create uniformly hot and cold regions that any page-level tiering backend can manage effectively. HADES demonstrates this frontend/backend approach through a compiler-runtime system that tracks and migrates objects based on access patterns, requiring minimal developer intervention. Evaluations across ten data structures achieve up to 70% memory reduction with 3% performance overhead, showing that address space engineering enables existing reclamation systems to reclaim memory aggressively without performance degradation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.19765,
  title  = {Tidying Up the Address Space},
  author = {Vinay Banakar and Suli Yang and Kan Wu and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Kimberly Keeton},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.19765},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:00:09.252Z