Benchmarks for Reference counting

Hello all,


We are studying the performance of reference counting on superscalar
architectures. We are using Dynamic Simplescalar and Jikes RVM for our
simulation infrastructure.  The ulterior RC algorithm we are using
copy-collects in the new gen and reference-counts in the old gen.

Initial runs using SPECJVM 98 and Da Capo benchmarks indicate very low
old-gen activity.  Changes to the implementation of reference counting cause
hardly any effect on performance.  This seems to indicate that
copy-collection dominates execution time, branch-misprediction rate, and all
other performance numbers.

Can anyone confirm that these benchmarks have low old-gen activity?
And can anyone point us to other benchmarks that have enough old-gen
activity for us to see the effects of changes in RC implementation?


Thanks
-Prasad