Renaissance 0.11 Released

June 05, 2020, author: Petr Tuma

A new release of the Renaissance benchmark suite includes several changes to the workloads:

  • movie-lens bug fix, where part of the setup was moved out of the core benchmark iteration,
  • log-regression bug fix, where input features are cached to avoid parsing the input during each benchmark iteration,
  • neo4j-analytics improvement that adds indices and uses placeholder for queries (contributed by Michael Hunger from Neo4J), and
  • dotty fix for Windows compatibility.

The Renaissance harness now forces a garbage collection run before each iteration. This changes especially the behavior of Spark based workloads, which would otherwise retain weakly referenced objects until Spark controlled cleanup once every 30 minutes. The garbage collection forced by the harness can be disabled with the --no-forced-gc flag.

The harness also includes two plugins, jmx-timers for collecting the JIT compilation times, and ubench-agent for collecting the values of arbitrary hardware performance counters.

The JSON result format now also includes OS and system metadata, which help capture the benchmark execution conditions across experiments.

We also note that Renaissance helped tune the OpenJDK HotSpot inlining settings.

Special thanks go to:

  • Michael Hunger from Neo4J for his contribution on the neo4j-analytics benchmark,
  • Guillaumes Martres from EPFL for his input on fixing the dotty benchmark for Windows, and
  • Tom Rodriguez from Oracle Labs for spotting a bug in log-regression.

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