PROCEDURE MERGING WITH INSTRUCTION CACHES

This paper describes a method of determining which procedures to merge for machines with instruction caches. The method uses profile information, the structure of the program, the cache size, and the cache miss penalty to guide the choice. Optimization for the cache is assumed to follow procedure merging. The method weighs the benefit of removing calls with the increase in the instruction cache miss rate. Better performance is achieved than previous schemes that do not consider the cache. Merging always results in a savings, unlike simpler schemes that can make programs slower once cache effects are considered. The new method also has better performance even when parameters to simpler algorithms are varied to get the best performance.