Managed languages such as Java and C# are increasingly being considered for hard real-time applications because of their productivity and software engineering advantages. Automatic memory management, or garbage collection, is a key enabler for robust, reusable libraries, yet remains a challenge for analysis and implementation of real-time execution environments. This article comprehensively compares leading approaches to hard real-time garbage collection. There are many design decisions involved in selecting a real-time garbage collection algorithm. For time-based garbage collectors on uniprocessors one must choose whether to use periodic, slack-based or hybrid scheduling. A significant impediment to valid experimental comparison of such choices is that commercial implementations use completely different proprietary infrastructures. We present Minuteman, a framework for experimenting with real-time collection algorithms in the context of a high-performance execution environment for real-time Java. We provide the first comparison of the approaches, both experimentally using realistic workloads, and analytically in terms of schedulability.
@article{Kalibera+2011TOCS,
author = {Kalibera, Tomas and Pizlo, Filip and Hosking, Antony L. and Vitek, Jan},
title = {Scheduling Real-Time Garbage Collection on Uniprocessors},
journal = {ACM Transactions on Computer Systems},
year = {2011},
volume = {29},
number = {3},
pages = {8:1--29},
month = {August},
doi = {10.1145/2003690.2003692},
acm = {http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N93689},
gscholar = {9}
}