Incremental Garbage Collection of a Persistent Object Store using PMOS

PMOS is an incremental garbage collector designed specifically to reclaim space in a persistent object store. It is complete in that it will, after a finite number of invocations, reclaim all unreachable storage. PMOS imposes minimum constraints on the order of collection and offers techniques to reduce the I/O traffic induced by the collector. Here we present the first implementation of the PMOS collector called PMOS#1. The collector has been incorporated into the stable heap layer of the generic persistent object store used to support a number of languages including Napier88. Our main design goals are to maintain the independence of the language from the store and to retain the existing store interface. The implementation has been completed and tested using a Napier88 system. The main results of this work show that the PMOS collector is implementable in a persistent store and that it can be built without requiring changes to the language interpreter. Initial performance measurements are reported. These results suggest however, that effective use of PMOS requires greater co-operation between language and store.