This paper shows that Appel-style garbage collectors often make suboptimal decisions both in terms of when and how to collect. We argue that garbage collection should be done when the amount of live bytes is low (in order to minimize the collection cost) and when the amount of dead objects is high (in order to maximize the available heap size after collection). In addition, we observe that Appe...

Garbage collection prevents security vulnerabilities that can otherwise be caused by incorrect manual memory management at the cost of increased runtime and space overheads. In some domains, the runtime overhead and unpredictable, lengthy pauses for garbage collection could be deemed unacceptable. Decades of research have proposed incremental, concurrent, and generational garbage collection as ...

While uniprocessor garbage collection is relatively well understood, experience with collectors for large multiprocessor servers is limited and it is unknown which techniques best scale with large memories and large numbers of processors. In order to explore these issues we designed a modular garbage collection framework in the IBM Jalapeño Java virtual machine and implemented five different pa...

This thesis presents an examination of design patterns within the context of garbage collection. Initially, I review garbage collection and design patterns. Four garbage collectors are then examined and the design patterns found described. Both domain speci c and generic patterns are described. The domain speci c patterns are TriColour and RootSet, the generic patterns are Adaptor, Facade, Iter...

This seminar report presents adoptions of uniprocessor garbage collection techniques which are able to operate in a new context: distributed systems. We see that their application to distributed system poses new problems and that there is currently no algorithm available solving, or even addressing, all of them. The presented algorithms are structured according to their belonging family: refere...

The wide-scale deployment of multi-core and many-core processors will necessitate fundamental changes to garbage collectors. Highly parallel garbage collection is critical to the performance of these systems — today’s garbage collectors can quickly become the bottleneck for parallel programs. These processors will present additional new challenges — many contain non-uniform memory architectures...

Scheme uses garbage collection for heap memory management. Ideally, garbage collectors should be able to reclaim all dead objects, i.e. objects that will not be used in future. However, garbage collectors collect only those dead objects that are not reachable from any program variable. Dead objects that are reachable from program variables are not reclaimed. In this paper we describe our experi...

This paper shows that Appel-style garbage collectors often make suboptimal decisions both in terms of when and how to collect. We argue that garbage collection should be done when the amount of live bytes is low (in order to minimize the collection cost) and when the amount of dead objects is high (in order to maximize the available heap size after collection). In addition, we observe that Appe...

Concurrent garbage collectors are notoriously difficult to implement correctly. Previous approaches to the issue of producing correct collectors have mainly been based on posit-and-prove verification or on the application of domain-specific templates and transformations. We show how to derive the upper reaches of a family of concurrent garbage collectors by refinement from a formal specificatio...