Quantitative Analysis of Boehm's Gc

The term garbage collection describes the automated process of finding previously allocated memory that is no longer in use in order to make the memory available to satisfy subsequent allocation requests. We have reviewed existing papers and implementations of GC, and especially analyzed Boehm's C codes, which is a real-time mark-sweep GC running under Linux and ANSI C standard. In this paper, we will quantitatively analyze the performance of different configurations of Boehm's collector subjected to different workloads. Reported measurements demonstrate that a refined garbage collector is a viable alternative to traditional explicit memory management techniques, even for low-level languages. It is more a trade-off for certain system than an all-or-nothing proposition.