Portable, Mostly-Concurrent, Mostly-Copying Garbage Collection for Multi-Processors

Hosking, Antony L.

Abstract

Modern commodity platforms increasingly support thread-level parallelism, which must be exploited by garbage collected applications. We describe the design and implementation of a portable mostly-concurrent mostly-copying garbage collector that exhibits scalable performance on multi-processors. We characterize its performance for heap-intensive workloads on two different multi-processor platforms, showing maximum pause times two orders of magnitude shorter than for fully stop-the-world collection at the cost of some total mutator throughput.

@inproceedings{Hosking2006ISMM,
  author = {Hosking, Antony L.},
  title = {Portable, Mostly-Concurrent, Mostly-Copying Garbage
                    Collection for Multi-Processors},
  booktitle = {ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management},
  series = {ISMM},
  year = {2006},
  pages = {40--51},
  month = {June},
  address = {Ottawa, Canada},
  doi = {10.1145/1133956.1133963},
  acm = {http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N93664},
  gscholar = {8}
}