The application binaries were transformed by SpecHint on a 500MHz AlphaStation 500 with 1.5GB of memory. SpecHint is an unoptimized research prototype. Nevertheless, as shown in Table 3, SpecHint was able to modify our benchmark applications in a reasonable amount of time, 21 to 151 seconds. The resulting binaries were processed by the standard linker to produce speculating executables that, unlike the original application executables, contain shadow code, the SpecHint binaries, and libraries to support threading. These additions resulted in a 138% to 610% increase in executable size.
| Benchmark | Modification time (s) | Transformed executable size (KB) | % increase in executable size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agrep | 21 | 1,648 | 610% |
| Gnuld | 23 | 2,408 | 349% |
| XDataSlice | 151 | 10,792 | 138% |