A generational on-the-fly garbage collector for Java

Domani, Tamar; Kolodner, Elliot K.; Petrank, Erez

doi:10.1145/349299.349336

Cited by 67 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…The colors can be kept in the object header or in a separate table. Following previous work (e.g., [11,1,16]) we have chosen the latter. Bartok assumes that objects are 4-byte aligned.…”

Section: A Mark-sweep Collectormentioning

confidence: 99%

Automated verification of practical garbage collectors

HawblitzelChris

PetrankErez

2009

SIGPLAN Not.

Self Cite

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Garbage collectors are notoriously hard to verify, due to their lowlevel interaction with the underlying system and the general difficulty in reasoning about reachability in graphs. Several papers have presented verified collectors, but either the proofs were handwritten or the collectors were too simplistic to use on practical applications. In this work, we present two mechanically verified garbage collectors, both practical enough to use for real-world C# benchmarks. The collectors and their associated allocators consist of x86 assembly language instructions and macro instructions, annotated with preconditions, postconditions, invariants, and assertions. We used the Boogie verification generator and the Z3 automated theorem prover to verify this assembly language code mechanically. We provide measurements comparing the performance of the verified collector with that of the standard Bartok collectors on off-the-shelf C# benchmarks, demonstrating their competitiveness.

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“…The colors can be kept in the object header or in a separate table. Following previous work (e.g., [11,1,16]) we have chosen the latter. Bartok assumes that objects are 4-byte aligned.…”

Section: A Mark-sweep Collectormentioning

confidence: 99%

Automated verification of practical garbage collectors

HawblitzelChris

PetrankErez

2009

SIGPLAN Not.

Self Cite

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“…The collector combines incremental and priority-aware concurrent GC and achieves effective load balancing of parallel GC threads. On-the-fly GC [Domani et al 2000;Azatchi et al 2003], is a generational mark-sweep collector that eliminates the need for a system-wide safepoint, that is, it never stops all mutator threads at the same time. In Levanoni and Petrank [2006], the authors present on-the-fly reference counting GC for multiprocessors.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The single-referent collector

Wegiel

Krintz

2009

ACM Trans. Archit. Code Optim.

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Compactors that move or copy objects need to adjust pointers. In extant compactors, pointer adjustment involves inspecting every pointer in the heap and computing the target address for each pointer. At the same time, in modern Managed Runtime Environments (MREs), only a fraction of pointers in the heap changes during compaction. This is because state-of-the-art MREs do not compact the prefix of the heap that contains few dead objects, allowing gaps between live objects and tolerating small space overhead.We describe the design and implementation of the Single-Referent Collector (SRC), a new compactor that reduces the cost of pointer manipulation by avoiding inspection and adjustment of pointers that do not change. SRC exploits the fact that in modern applications, most live objects have only one incoming pointer. For such objects, SRC stores the address of the referent in the object header. Only objects that move have their referent inspected and adjusted. The remaining pointers in the heap are not processed. SRC uses an overflow table to handle objects with multiple incoming pointers.We investigate a number of standard benchmarks and open-source applications to substantiate key statistical observations that underlie the design of SRC. We implement SRC in the HotSpot JVM as part of a generational collection system and compare it empirically with the Lisp2 compactor. We find that, by decreasing the cost of pointer processing, SRC enables significant reduction in pause times and improves application throughput. ACM Reference Format:Wegiel, M. and Krintz, C. 2009. The single-referent collector: Optimizing compaction for the common case. ACM Trans.

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“…The "train" incremental algorithm [30] uses a write barrier to track references among different heap areas that are collected independently. Fully-concurrent (i.e., having no stop-the-world phase) on-the-fly mark-sweep collectors are unable to move objects [22,21,24,23,3]. Similarly for concurrent [18] and on-the-fly [4,34] reference counting collectors, which are also unable to collect cycles.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Portable, mostly-concurrent, mostly-copying garbage collection for multi-processors

Hosking

2006

Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Memory Management

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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 multiprocessor 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.

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A generational on-the-fly garbage collector for Java

Cited by 67 publications

References 16 publications

Automated verification of practical garbage collectors

Automated verification of practical garbage collectors

The single-referent collector

Portable, mostly-concurrent, mostly-copying garbage collection for multi-processors

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