GraalVM Native Image is increasingly used to optimize the startup performance of applications that run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and particularly of Function-as-a-Service and Serverless workloads. Native Image resorts to Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation to produce a binary from a JVM application that contains a snapshot of the pre-initialized heap memory, reducing the initialization time and hence improving startup performance. However, this performance improvement is hindered by page faults that occur when accessing objects in the heap snapshot. Related work has proposed profile-guided approaches to reduce page faults by reordering objects in the heap snapshot of an optimized binary based on the order in which objects are first accessed, obtaining this information by profiling an instrumented binary of the same application. This reordering is effective only if objects in the instrumented binary can be matched to the semantically equivalent ones in the optimized binary. Unfortunately, this is very challenging because object do not have unique identities and the heap-snapshot contents are not persistent across Native-Image builds of the same program.

This work tackles the problem of matching heap snapshots, and proposes a novel approach to improve the mapping between semantically equivalent objects in different binaries of a Native-Image application. We introduce the concept of \emph{context-augmented heap path (CAHP)}—a list of elements that describes a path to an object stored in the heap snapshot. Our approach associates a CAHP to each object in a way that is as unique as possible. Objects with the same CAHP across different binaries are considered semantically equivalent. Moreover, since some semantically equivalent objects may have different CAHPs in the instrumented and optimized binaries (due to nondeterminism in the image-build process and other factors), we present an approach that finds, for each unmatched CAHP in the optimized binary, the most similar CAHP in the instrumented binary, associating the two objects. We integrate our approach into Native Image, reordering the objects stored in the heap snapshot more efficiently using the improved mapping. Our experiments show that our approach leads to much less page faults ($2.98\times$ on average) and considerably improves startup time ($1.98\times$ on average) w.r.t.~the original Native-Image implementation.