Speculative caching of individual fields in a distributed object system

A computer software product, comprising a computer-readable medium in which computer program instructions are stored, which instructions, when read by a computer, cause the computer to perform the steps of:

• executing threads of an application on a plurality of interconnected nodes in a network;
• allocating memory of said nodes to Java compatible data objects;
• responsive to said step of limiting memory for one of said Java compatible data objects, applying a predefined set of criteria to individual fields of said one Java compatible data object;
• selecting read-locally fields from said individual fields according to said predefined set of criteria;
• caching said read-locally fields in a cache of at least one of said nodes to define cached instances of said read-locally fields, performance of said step of caching being transparent to said application;
• and
• fetching at least one of said cached instances of said read-locally fields from said cache during execution of one of said threads by a proxy that is associated with said cache.

A distributed computing system, comprising:

• a plurality of processing units interconnected in a network;
• a runtime support program installed in at least one of said processing units and directing said processing units, wherein said processing units execute threads of an application, and responsive to program instructions of said application, said time support program transparently causes said processing units to execute the steps of:
• allocating a portion of a memory to a Java compatible data object;
• responsive to said step of allocating, applying a predefined set of criteria to individual fields of said Java compatible data object;
• selecting read-locally fields from said individual fields according to said predefined set of criteria;
• caching said read-locally fields in a cache of at least one of said processing units to define cached instances of said read-locally fields;
• and
• fetching at least one of said cached instances of said read-locally fields from said cache during execution of one of said threads by said one processing unit.