Performance of a hardware-assisted real-time garbage collector

Abstract

Hardware-assisted real-time garbage collection offers high throughput and small worst-case bounds on the times required to allocate dynamic objects and to access the memory contained within previously allocated objects. Whether the proposed technology is cost effective depends on various choices between configuration alternatives. This paper reports the performance of several different configurations of the hardware-assisted real-time garbage collection system subjected to several different workloads. Reported measurements demonstrate that hardware-assisted real-time garbage collection is a viable alternative to traditional explicit memory management techniques, even for low-level languages like C++.

High-level dynamic memory management for object-oriented real-time systems

“…C++ programs ported to the simulated computer architecture offer performance ranging roughly from 10% faster to 25% slower than traditional implementations of the same programs [3,4]. But performance is not the only issue.…”